Abstract
The shifting of welfare systems to the local level may have positive or negative consequences. On the one hand, it may be argued that local governments better tailor welfare policies to the specific needs of population, given their direct knowledge of territory; on the other hand, especially in the presence of weak supervision by the central government, decentralization may cause inequalities and territorial fragmentation. The main objective of the paper is to explore the relationship between welfare state typologies – with different degrees of decentralization – and the level of monetary poverty and material deprivation of citizens. Using data from official statistics, we model individual binary outcomes (living or not under the poverty line, being or not able to make ends meet) as a function of both family- level and country-level characteristics. The empirical analysis is run on a selection of European countries for the year 2013.
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Notes
- 1.
It is worth noting that we obtained consistent results applying a multilevel (random intercept) logistic regression. Due to space constraints we decided not to show them in the paper, however they may be required to the authors.
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Acknowledgements
This work was developed under the framework of the University of Pisa research project PRA 2016-35 PO.WE.R (POlicy, WElfare and financial Resources: the impact of crisis on territories). We thank Eurostat for making Eusilc micro data available. The responsibility for all conclusions drawn from the data lies entirely with the authors.
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Coli, A., Pacini, B. (2019). European Welfare States: Does Decentralization Affect Poverty?. In: Bianco, A., Conigliaro, P., Gnaldi, M. (eds) Italian Studies on Quality of Life. Social Indicators Research Series, vol 77. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-06022-0_21
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