IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/lis/liswps/908.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Combating Inequalities: What Role for Universal Social Protection?

Author

Listed:
  • Shahra Razavi
  • Umberto Cattaneo

  • Helmut Schwarzer
  • Andrea Visentin

Abstract

The primary aim of this study is to provide evidence regarding the impact of social protection benefits, taxes and social security contributions in reducing income inequalities. The study employs a well-established methodology to estimate the partial redistributive effect of contributory and non-contributory pensions, family benefits, unemployment benefits, sickness and employment injury benefits, disability benefits, social security contributions, as well as income and property taxes. The partial redistributive effect corresponds to the percentage decrease in the Gini coefficient that is attributable to each social protection benefit and tax. The main data input is microdata from the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS). The evidence presented shows that social protection benefits, and its financing through taxes and social security contributions, are effective policy measures for reducing income inequalities. On average countries that spend more on social protection are those that experience larger reductions in income inequality. The paper concludes with practical recommendations on how to finance and design social protection systems that reduce inequalities, as well as ideas for future research in this area.

Suggested Citation

  • Shahra Razavi & Umberto Cattaneo & Helmut Schwarzer & Andrea Visentin, 2025. "Combating Inequalities: What Role for Universal Social Protection?," LIS Working papers 908, LIS Cross-National Data Center in Luxembourg.
    • Handle: RePEc:lis:liswps:908
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.lisdatacenter.org/wps/liswps/908.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    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:lis:liswps:908. 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: Piotr Paradowski (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/lisprlu.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.