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Substantial cross-national differences in poverty alleviation are well documented. But the extent to which different parts of the social transfer system account for this variation is still relatively unexamined. This paper analyses the redistributive effects of specific social policy institutions in a comparative perspective. The main question is to what extent non-means-tested entitlements and means-tested benefits reduce relative economic poverty in different institutional settings. It is shown that the structure of non-means-tested benefits is more important than that of means-tested benefits in explaining differences in poverty alleviation across countries. The paper also presents a new method for estimating the anti-poverty effects of separate parts of the social transfer system. This method decomposes the anti-poverty effects of a set of social transfers into independent and combined effects, which produces more valid results than prevalent methods used to assess the impact of a particular transfer on poverty. The countries included in this study are Canada, Germany, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States. The empirical analyses are based on data from the Social Citizenship Indicators Programme (SCIP) and Luxembourg Income Study (LIS) describing the situation in the mid-1990s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper compares recent developments in income inequality in Canada, Germany, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States. In addition to describing cross-national variation in changes in income inequality, the paper examines different explanatory factors for these recent developments. The findings reported indicate that there is substantial cross-national variation, not only with regard to the level of inequality, but furthermore with regard to changes in inequality. The results indicate that the equalizing effect of welfare state redistribution did not decrease in all countries. By contrast, in all countries there was a universal tendency towards increased inequality in the pre-tax and transfer distribution, although the magnitude of the change differs from country to country. Even though a polarization of the earnings distribution is reported, the results still give no support to cross-national convergence with regard to income inequality during the 1980s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]