ISER has completed a briefing for the Child Poverty Action Group to provide a comparison of the effect of the 2012 tax-benefit systems on child poverty across the EU27.
The study by Dr Holguer Xavier Jara Tamayo and Chrysa Leventi uses EUROMOD to analyse data from all 27 countries within the EU.
The effectiveness of social security at tackling child poverty has been published as a briefing by the CPAG stating:
“While child poverty is responsive to, and requires, many different types of policy intervention, international evidence shows that social security is an essential tool for reducing child poverty. The note prepared for CPAG by the Institute for Social and Economic Research at Essex University vividly illustrates the effect of taxes and benefits on child poverty rates across the EU27 for 2012.
Figure 1 shows that the UK’s child poverty starting point is very high – we have the second highest child poverty rate before taxes and transfers in the EU27."
EUROMOD is a tax-benefit microsimulation model for the European Union (EU) that enables researchers and policy analysts to calculate, in a comparable manner, the effects of taxes and benefits on household incomes and work incentives for the population of each country and for the EU as a whole.
As well as calculating the effects of actual policies it is also used to evaluate the effects of tax-benefit policy reforms and other changes on poverty, inequality, incentives and government budgets.