The OECD Social Expenditure data base (SOCX) allows the monitoring of trends in aggregate social expenditure and changes in its composition. But aggregate social expenditure may sometimes fail to reflect the true ‘effort’ of a country in providing social support. Account needs to be taken of the effects of tax systems and transfers which, although mandatory, are not paid by government.

In order to get from a “gross” to a “net” concept of social expenditure various adjustments to raw data are needed. These adjustments concern: methods of benefit payment (“net” or “gross” of tax); the varying extent with which governments use fiscal instruments rather than cash transfers to pursue social policy goals; and the different degree to which government requires other economic agents to provide social expenditures. The analysis also addresses the automatic budget effects related to the stage of the economic cycle.

This analysis is a first attempt to capture in a comprehensive manner the effect ...

La base de données de l’OCDE sur les dépenses sociales (SOCX) permet d’observer l’évolution de l’ensemble des dépenses sociales ainsi que les modifications survenues dans leur composition. Mais ces dépenses dans leur ensemble peuvent parfois ne pas refléter l’effort véritable qu’un pays fournit pour apporter une aide sociale. Il faut tenir compte des effets du système fiscal et des transferts qui, bien qu’ils soient obligatoires, ne sont pas payés par le gouvernement.

Afin de passer d’un concept ‘brut” de dépenses sociales à un concept “net”, divers ajustements sur les données brutes sont nécessaires. Ces ajustements concernent : les méthodes de paiement des prestations (“nettes” ou “brutes” d’impôt); l’importance avec laquelle les gouvernements utilisent les instruments financiers plutôt que les transferts en espèces pour accomplir les objectifs de la politique sociale; et jusqu’à quel point le gouvernement a besoin d’autres agents économiques pour qu’ils fournissent des dépenses ...

Download Info

To download:

If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the proper application to view it first. Information about this may be contained in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read the IDEAS help file. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS site. Please be patient as the files may be large.

Publisher Info

Paper provided by OECD Directorate for Employment, Labour and Social Affairs in its series OECD Labour Market and Social Policy Occasional Papers with number 19.

Download reference. The following formats are available: HTML, plain text, BibTeX, RIS (EndNote), ReDIF
Length:
Date of creation: 1996
Date of revision:
Handle: RePEc:oec:elsaaa:19-en

Contact details of provider:
Postal: 2 rue Andre Pascal, 75775 Paris Cedex 16
Email:
Web page: http://www.oecd.org
More information through EDIRC

For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its listing, contact: ().

Related research

Keywords:

Cited by:
(explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)

1. Jakob de Haan & Jan-Egbert Sturm & Bjorn Volkerink, 2003. "How to Measure the Tax Burden on Labour at the Macro-Level?," CESifo Working Paper Series CESifo Working Paper No. , CESifo GmbH. [Downloadable!]
2. Verbist G, 2005. "Replacement Incomes and Taxes: A distributional analysis for the EU-15 countries," EUROMOD Working Papers em2/05, EUROMOD at the Institute for Social and Economic Research. [Downloadable!]

Did you know? About five million pdf files are downloaded through RePEc every year.

This page was last updated on 2008-7-3.