In response to structurally poor job prospects for the least skilled, a number of European countries have introduced measures to boost domestic services employment. No country has done so with more fervor than Belgium. Belgian consumers can use the so-called "Service Vouchers" to pay for a...

Income aggregates and poverty and inequality measures tend to show important differences when calculated either with disposable income reported in SILC data, or with the same income concept calculated on the basis of the microsimulation model EUROMOD, which starts from gross incomes in SILC....

Belgium has seen major changes in its tax-benefit system over the past twenty years. These changes have, to a large extent, co-determined the evolution of disposable incomes of Belgian households on one hand, and their incentives to work on the other. In this paper we assess equity and...

This article studies the impact of design characteristics of in-work benefits on employment and poverty in an international comparative setting, taking account of both first and second order labour supply effects. We use the micro-simulation model EUROMOD, which has been enriched with a discrete...

How can poverty reduction be improved and at what cost? Available evidence suggests that social investment strategies and employment policies are important but not sufficient. In order to reduce the number of people below the relative at-risk-of-poverty threshold of the EU, countries must...

Expanding childcare is often considered as a suitable way to enhance employment opportunities of mothers with young children as well as to reduce child poverty. In this study the authors critically investigate this assertion by simulating a set of scenarios of increasing subsidized childcare...

The working poor were long thought of as people toiling away in lousy, under-protected and underpaid jobs in places like fast-food joints, supermarkets, hotels and bars. The perfidious consequence of that perception was that in-work poverty was seen as a non-issue in countries with extensive...

The Directive on Adequate Minimum Wages represents a watershed initiative adding substance to the EU's social dimension. It contains two ambitious objectives: establishing the minimum level of statutory minimum wages (SMWs) at 60% of the gross median wage, and increasing collective bargaining...

Proponents of a basic income (BI) claim that it could bring significant reductions in financial poverty, on top of many other benefits, including greatly reduced administrative complexity and cost. Using microsimulation analysis in a comparative two-country setting, we show that the potential...

This project employs the theory of opportunity, described in Roemer''s book (Equality of Opportunity, Harvard University Press, 1998), to compute the extent to which tax-and-transfer regimes in ten countries equalize opportunities among citizens for income acquisition. Roughly speaking, equality...