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The drive to reduce child poverty is of particular interest in southern Europe, where the subsidiary role of the State in matters of family policy has implied that programmes of public assistance to poor families with children are often meagre or not available at all. The paper examines the effect of family transfers (used broadly to include contributory family allowances, non-contributory child benefits and tax credits or allowances) on child poverty in Greece, Italy, Spain and Portugal. Using the European microsimulation model EUROMOD, the paper first assesses the distributional impact of existing family transfers and finds it is weak. The scope for policy reforms is then explored. By way of illustration, universal child benefit schemes similar to those in Britain, Denmark and Sweden are simulated. The impact of such schemes on child poverty is shown to be considerable, but their fiscal cost correspondingly substantial. The paper concludes with a discussion of key findings and policy implications.

Means-tested social assistance programs have acquired, in the last two decades, an increasing role in the majority of industrialised countries. Although the issue of whether social assistance should be targeted or universally granted remains a main subject of dispute (Harding et al. 1994; Mitchell 1995; Smolensky et al. 1995; Atkinson 1995, 1998), the shift towards targeting is in practice quite widespread, mainly reflecting the wish to curb social security budgets in a general context of fiscal restraint. The issue of targeting welfare assumes a particular importance in Italy, whose social assistance programs resemble more the rudimentary regimes typical of Southern Europe than the evolved systems of other EU countries. Indeed, the Italian welfare system is characterised by a number of categorical schemes limited to aged and disabled people, a discretionary relief (mainly in kind) provided by regional and local governments, and the absence of a national minimum income scheme as a universal safety net. To tackle these severe shortcomings, an articulated plan of reform proposals has been put forward in a report issued in 1997 by a special governmental commission on social expenditure. Some of its proposals have recently found two important applications, the reform of means-testing criteria and the experimental introduction of a national safety net scheme, an absolute novelty for the Italian system. The strategy behind the reform is to increase assistance for those most in need and to ensure that public expenditure is better targeted. The paper deals with the distributive implications associated with this reform plan, and in particular with the new entitlement rules which have recently designed to establish the access to welfare expenditure. Section 2 critically reviews the Italian social assistance system and briefly describes the institutional design of the new targeting system, which will gradually substitute the tests of means currently applied. Using the micro-data contained in the most recent sample survey of household income and wealth conducted by the Bank of Italy1 and the tax-benefit microsimulation model Dirimod95, Section 2 also examines the sense in which the shortcomings mentioned above substantially undermine the effectiveness and efficiency of income support programs in alleviating poverty among Italian households. Section 3 is devoted to study how different economic and demographic groups of the population are likely to change their relative position if households are ranked first by a variable representing old means-testing criteria, and then by the new test of means; this analysis aims to clarify how various groups are likely to change their relative probabilities to access social services. Section 4 evaluates the distributive impact of the new spending programs introduced with the budget law for 1999 and of some reforms of the whole assistance system which, although highly speculative, can shed some light on the likely direction towards which the Italian welfare state is evolving. Finally, Section 5 concludes.

We illustrate a proposal to reform the personal income tax and the family allowance in Italy which aims at attaining a fair tax treatment of the family, laying emphasis on the redistributive processes in favour of large and poor households. Our proposal is based on a simplification of the tax rate schedule (with a reduction of income brackets) and a new design of the tax credits for dependents which implies the fiscal exemption of a sort of basic income, which is decreasing as the income of the household increases. The new scheme of supplementary tax credits for dependents, related to family income thresholds, would match the need to keep into account the economic conditions of the household with the need to avoid the abandonment of the definition of ability to pay on individual basis. The proposal also aims at attaining a closer integration between the personal income taxation and the family allowance, with a sizable revaluation of the amount of family allowances and its extension to self-employee. The distributional analysis, using the tax-benefit model DIRIMOD, shows a slight revenue loss and a significant increase, with respect to the 1995 system, in both the progressivity and the redistributive impact of the income tax. The distributional effects are even stronger if we keep into consideration the reformed system of family allowances.

Questo lavora effettua una ricognizione nel campo della microsimulazione dinamica per l'analisi delle politiche fiscali al fine di mostrarne le caratteristiche generali, i pregi e i limiti attualmente riscontrabili. Alla luce delle esperienze maturate, in particolare, negli Stati Uniti, in Germania e nel Regno Unito, si evidenziano i principali problemi metodologi e di qualità dei dati che la costruzione di modelli di microsimulazione dinamici pone rispetto a quelli statici. Un sottoinsieme di modelli dinamici, quelli a coorte dinamica, è preso in esame più in dettaglio. Di questi si descrive la struttura, le difficoltà concettuali e i margini di applicazione per l'analisi redistributiva di tipo life-cycle.

La teoria della misurazione della disuguaglianza ha subito nuovi importanti impulsi negli ultimi venti anni in seguito all'impiego, mutuato dalla teoria delle scelte in condizioni di incertezza, delle condizioni di dominanza stocastica. L'approccio perseguito è quello del confronto, in termini di benessere sociale, tra diverse distribuzioni di reddito sulla base di un criterio di ordinamento parziale. Tale impostazione si contrappone a quella assiomatica in quanto non implica l'adesione ad alcuna specifica misura sintetica della disuguaglianza nè quindi ad un giudizio di valore particolare, non necessariamente condiviso, in tema di equity. In questo lavoro si intende ripercorrere in modo sistematico tale recente filone della letteratura, che si fonda sul criterio di dominanza di Lorenz e su ulteriori estensioni teoriche, quali la dominanza generalizzata e quella generalizzata e sequenziale.

E' stata recentemente avanzata l'ipotesi di introdurre un'addizionale IRPEF dell'1% in alternativa al previsto aumento dello 0.9% dei contributi previdenziali a carico dei lavoratori dipendenti. In tal modo si sostituirebbe un incremento di imposta generalizzato ad un aumento di contribuzione gravante sui soli lavoratori dipendenti.

This paper surveys some of recent theoretical developments in the Ricardian equivalence debate.