The take up of social benefits

Abstract

The shift in favour of means-tested benefits observed in several European countries since the early 1980s and the rise of refundable tax credits since the mid-1990s raise the questions of how well-targeted such benefits are and what the distributional implications of target inefficiency might be.
This research note, using the EUROMOD tax-benefit model, presents the results of estimating the effects of non-take up on target efficiency and on the performance of social assistance benefits in reducing the relative number of people with income below the poverty line.