ON THE SOCIAL SELEDIVITY OF PUBLIC SPENDING PRO-GRAMMES.

This article presents the social selectivity of public spending programs. Interest in the social selectivity of public expenditure in the Netherlands has been greatly stimulated by the White Paper on Personal Income Distribution of 1975. In this paper, Den Uyl's centre-left coalition presented a comprehensive view of what constitutes an acceptable tradeoff between efficiency and equality in the creation and redistribution of earned income. The government's Social and Cultural Planning Office (SCP) in 1975 concluded a research contract with the Rotterdam institute of Fiscal Studies at Erasmus University, and embarked on a study of the distributive effects of public spending programmes. The present paper reports on the major findings of this research program, and on some of the topics in the debate it has generated in the profession. The analytical framework of benefit and expenditure incidence, and discusses criteria for selecting units of measurement. After a presentation of empirical findings, the paper concludes with some observations on the normative framework in which the social selectivity of public spending programs may be appraised.