@article{72dd686a5cde41b380b1f66f1f2fa1b9,
title = "Welfare states as lifecycle redistribution machines: Decomposing the roles of age and socio-economic status shows that European tax-and-benefit systems primarily redistribute across age groups",
abstract = "Social scientists identify two core functions of modern welfare states as redistribution across (a) socio-economic status groups (Robin Hood) and (b) {\textquoteright}the lifecycle{\textquoteright} (the piggy bank). But what is the relative importance of these functions? The answer has been elusive, as the piggy bank is metaphorical. The intra-personal time-travel of resources it implies is based on non-quid-pro-quo transfers. In practice, {\textquoteleft}lifecycle redistribution{\textquoteright} must operate through inter-age-group resource reallocation in cross-section. Since at any time different birth cohorts live together, {\textquoteright}resource-productive{\textquoteright} working-aged people are taxed to finance consumption of {\textquoteright}resource-dependent{\textquoteright} younger and older people. In a novel decomposition analysis, we study the joint distribution of socio-economic status, age, and respectively (a) all cash and in-kind transfers ({\textquoteleft}benefits{\textquoteright}), (b) financing contributions ({\textquoteleft}taxes{\textquoteright}), and (c) resulting {\textquoteleft}net benefits,{\textquoteright} on a sample of over 400,000 Europeans from 22 EU countries. European welfare states, often maligned as ineffective Robin Hood vehicles riddled with Matthew effects, are better characterized as inter-age redistribution machines performing a more important second task rather well: lifecycle consumption smoothing. Social policies serve multiple goals in Europe, but empirically they are neither primarily nor solely responsible for poverty relief and inequality reduction. ",
keywords = "NTA, poverty, inequality, welfare states, age redistricution, class redistribution, non-social policy, social polict",
author = "Pieter Vanhuysse and Marton Medgyesi and Robert Gal",
year = "2021",
month = aug,
day = "25",
doi = "10.1371/journal.pone.0255760",
language = "English",
volume = "16",
journal = "PLOS ONE",
issn = "1932-6203",
publisher = "Public Library of Science",
number = "8",
}