COMPARING THE EFFECTS OF CASH BENEFITS AND IN-KIND SERVICES ON FAMILY OUTCOMES USING MACRO-LEVEL CROSS-NATIONAL DATA: A SCOPING PAPER.

This scoping paper explores issues around policy choices and child and family outcomes. It does so as part of a wider programme of work in the OECD on cash benefits and in-kind services. Our analysis is focused on two questions in particular: Can analysis of public expenditures and policy structures identify which factors underlie the variation of family and child well-being outcomes at country level? And, in methodological terms, how far can such an analysis take us utilising secondary analysis of pre-existing macro-level data. The paper has three core sections. In the first we outline some contextual data on spending and outcomes addressing the question of 'how much?' is spent on child and family focused cash and in-kind benefits. In the second, we consider the question of 'how' this spending is structured, examining key policy structures and how these might be included in analysis that interacts data on policy structures with data on the level of spending. We draw on fuzzy set ideal type analysis to assist our classification of countries into different types according to their family policy structures. In the third section we report the results of the analysis on the interactions between policy structures and levels of spending, considering whether interactions between the 'how' and the 'how much' of spending impact on key family policy outcomes in identifiable ways. Much of our pooled TSCS regression analysis points to limits in such an approach along with suggestions for future research that will allow these limitations to be addressed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]