Inequality reduction and social transfers: Empirical evidence for 35 European countries, 2004-2018
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.7203/IREP.4.2.25797Abstract
This paper aims to determine which categories of social expenditure are the most effective in reducing market income inequality and to quantify how much they contribute to that improvement. For this purpose, we have assembled a sample of 35 European countries for the period 2004-2018 on which we applied regression analysis techniques for panel data. Our results point to the crucial importance of spending on housing, unemployment, and old age to explain the redistributive effectiveness of social expenditure. Likewise, we detected the critical role of the economic cycle and other factors associated with each country that were not captured by the independent variables included in our model.
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