The drive to reduce child poverty is of particular interest in southern Europe, where the subsidiary role of the State in matters of family policy has implied that programmes of public assistance to poor families with children are often meagre or not available at all. The paper examines the...

This paper has two principal objectives. Using a tax-benefit microsimulation model and the 1998 micro data of the Bank of Italy survey of household income and wealth, we first study the distributional effects of the current Italian income maintenance system and highlight its main defects and...