Most welfare states design their tax/benefit system to combat income poverty. Some countries are more effective in poverty alleviation than others. What can explain these variations in outcomes and effectiveness? And has the redistributive power of different social programs changed over time and...

The European Union coordinates and encourages Member State actions to combat poverty, and to reform their social protection systems on the basis of policy exchanges and mutual learning ('best practices'). This paper analyses the effectiveness of welfare state policies and especially social...

The European Union coordinates and encourages Member State actions to combat poverty, and to reform their social protection systems on the basis of policy exchanges and mutual learning (‘best practices'). Some EU countries are more effective in poverty reduction than others. What can explain...

Given the ageing of the populations in many Western countries, older people constitute an important group in the analysis of poverty. In this chapter, we examine the poverty incidence among older people across LIS countries, relying on data from the Luxembourg Income Study. The data show that...

Poverty alleviation is an important objective of European countries and of the United States. If these ‘rich' states offer elaborate systems of income maintenance, why is there still a considerable amount of poverty? And why are anti-poverty outcomes so different in the United States compared...

Despite the fact that employment rates have increased in many European countries since the beginning of the 2000s, poverty rates have stagnated and in some countries even increased. In the welfare state literature, it has been argued that these disappointing poverty trends may be partly...