IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/hhs/sofiwp/2009_009.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Minimum Income Protection and Low-Income Standards: Is Social Assistance Enough for Poverty Alleviation?

Author

Listed:
  • Nelson, Kenneth

    (Swedish Institute for Social Research, Stockholm University)

Abstract

Minimum income protection and social assistance is the last-resort safety net of the welfare state, targeted to the most vulnerable groups in society. Poverty alleviation is thus one chief objective of such benefits. Whether this objective is fulfilled is continuously discussed and debated. This paper provide new evidence on this issue and offers an analysis of social assistance benefit levels in 16 industrialized welfare democracies over the period 1990-2000. It is shown that the period 1990-1995 was characterized primarily by stagnated benefit levels, while in the latter half of the 1990s benefits declined. In most countries, social assistance fails to provide income above the poverty threshold, something that makes it difficult to view these benefits as effective redistributive instruments.

Suggested Citation

  • Nelson, Kenneth, 2009. "Minimum Income Protection and Low-Income Standards: Is Social Assistance Enough for Poverty Alleviation?," Working Paper Series 9/2009, Stockholm University, Swedish Institute for Social Research.
    • Handle: RePEc:hhs:sofiwp:2009_009
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sofi.su.se/content/1/c6/03/09/74/WP09no9.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    -;

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:hhs:sofiwp:2009_009. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Daniel Rossetti (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/sofsuse.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.