Fighting poverty is one of the main goals in the most societies. This is usually done by the transferring resources to the poor. There exists a widespread view that the European countries are more generous to the poor than the United States. We study whether this is really the case. Firts we review the evidence on aggregate spending and we do not find convincing support for that view. Secondly, we analyze microeconomic evidence from the Current Population Survey and the European Community Household Panel and find mixed results. In particular, when we use the concept of relative poverty, we find that average transfers per poor person in the United States are 54% higher than in the European Union. When we exclude the old from the sample, this difference reduces to 20%.
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Paper provided by Instituto Valenciano de Investigaciones Económicas, S.A. (Ivie) in its series Working Papers. Serie AD with number
2008-05.
Find related papers by JEL classification: H51 - Public Economics - - National Government Expenditures and Related Policies - - - Government Expenditures and Health H53 - Public Economics - - National Government Expenditures and Related Policies - - - Government Expenditures and Welfare Programs I38 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Welfare and Poverty - - - Government Programs; Provision and Effects of Welfare Programs
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