Zusammenfassung:
This study aims to compare the anti-poverty effectiveness of taxes and income transfers among western welfare states. It is shown that a country's poverty outcome can be decomposed into the level of market-generated poverty, the overall level of welfare efforts, and the poverty reduction efficiency of taxes and transfers. Using the LIS micro data, the decomposition analysis suggests that welfare states differ widely in respect to the anti-poverty effectiveness of taxes and transfers and that cross-national variation in anti-poverty effectiveness is mainly attributed to differences in the level of welfare efforts, rather than to differences in the poverty reduction efficiency.