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Social Investment and Poverty Reduction: A Comparative Analysis across Fifteen European Countries

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 April 2015

OLAF VAN VLIET  and
CHEN WANG
OLAF VAN VLIET
Affiliation:
Department of Economics, Leiden University, PO Box 9520, 2300 RA Leiden, The Netherlands email: o.p.van.vliet@law.leidenuniv.nl
CHEN WANG
Affiliation:
Department of Economics, Leiden University, PO Box 9520, 2300 RA Leiden, The Netherlands email: c.wang@law.leidenuniv.nl
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Abstract

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 attributable to the reforming of traditional welfare state programmes into social investment policies, because the latter are less redistributive. To date, there are only a few systematic comparative empirical analyses which focus on the outcomes of social investment policies. This paper contributes to the social investment literature by empirically analysing the distributional effects of shifts from traditional welfare state arrangements to social investment policies in fifteen European countries for the period 1997–2007. Our results suggest that the detrimental effect of social investment policies, described in some specific cases in the literature, cannot be generalised across a larger group of European countries. However, for European countries other than the Nordic countries, the results provide some evidence for a linkage between stagnating or increasing poverty trends and shifts in expenditures to new welfare state programmes.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Social Policy , Volume 44 , Issue 3 , July 2015 , pp. 611 - 638
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

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