Silvia Avram

Income redistribution in the European Union

We explore the redistributive effects of taxes and benefits in the 27 member states of the European Union (EU) using EUROMOD, the tax-benefit microsimulation model for the EU. As well as describing redistributive effects in aggregate, we assess and compare the effectiveness of eight individual types of policy in reducing income disparities. We derive results for the 27 members of the EU using policies in effect in 2010 and present them for each country separately as well as for the EU as a whole.JEL codesD31, H24, I38.

What can international comparisons teach us about school choice and non-governmental schools in Europe?

All European states have a primary obligation to establish and maintain governmental schools everywhere, but as the result of political struggle and constitutional guarantees, they have also allowed and often financed non-state schools based on special pedagogical, religious or philosophical ideas. Depending on the level of state grants for non-state schools, states have more or less the right to supervise these non-governmental schools and seek to guarantee that the quality of organisation and teachers are not lower than those in governmental schools. Using comparable cross-national data for all member states of the European Union, we first describe four existing basic arrangements of non-governmental and governmental schools: integrated educational systems of public and non-state schools, denomination supportive educational systems, limited-support non-governmental schools and educational systems with segregated public and non-state schools. Using the same cross-national data for all member states of the European Union, we then explore three other topics: parental background and the choice of non-governmental schools, non-governmental schools and their cognitive outcomes, and non-governmental schools and their non-cognitive outcomes. There are important differences between non-governmental-independent (without state grants) and non-governmental-dependent schools (with state grants); that school choice of non-governmental-dependent schools is more related to socially mobile parents, whereas schools choice of non-governmental-independent schools is more related the reproduction of social classes; that in a majority of European countries, non-governmental-dependent schools are more effective cognitively than governmental schools, but that non-governmental-independent schools are more effective cognitively only in a few countries and more ineffective in a larger number of countries. Also non-governmental-dependent schools are not more effective non-cognitively than governmental schools.

School Sector Variation on Non-Cognitive Dimensions: Are Non-Public but Publicly Supported Schools More Effective?.

Denominational schooling makes up an important part of European educational systems. Given its specificity, denominational schooling can be expected to place a greater weight on values teaching and moral education. It also may be more successful in creating a warm and caring atmosphere, thus helping students to better emotionally connect to the school community. We compare public and publicly supported private (as a proxy to denominational) schools on 2 dimensions, namely the emotional integration with the rest of the school community and the concern and feelings of responsibility towards the environment. Except for Austria, Belgium, and Spain, no evidence could be found that the type of the school has any impact on the reported psychological adaptation to the school. In these 3 countries, publicly supported private schools tend to be more successful in integrating their students. Also, students in public and private dependent schools were equally environment oriented.

Social Class Dimensions in the Selection of Private Schools A cross-national analysis using PISA

One of the most hotly disputed debates in educational policy in the last twenty years has undoubtedly been the one centred on parental choice. Both its promoters and its critics have gone to great length to argue their point. In the Anglo- Saxon context, school choice has been pushed onto the reform agenda by the conservative administrations in the United Kingdom and the United States. It represented the educational sector equivalent of similar reforms aimed at introducing market-like mechanisms in the public sector, in an attempt to improve quality and reduce costs. By giving parents freedom to enrol their children at a school other than the designated one in their catchment area, supporters argued, schools would be forced to compete for students. In turn, competition would incentivize schools to be more responsive to parental demand and to improve their service or risk being closed (Chubb and Moe 1990; Hoxby 2002).

Religion and Schooling: The European Context

Chapter 1 has pointed to the changing role of education in schooling across Europe. There are two levels at which religion can impact on education practices: at the macro level, by impinging on the way the educational system is organized, and at the micro level, in terms of the types of schools parents choose for their children. At the macro level, both State provision of religious education and the position of faith schools are of particular interest. While most European countries have a well-established network of faith schools, the level of support that these schools receive from the State varies substantially. At the micro level, questions of which parents choose to educate their children at faith schools, as well as the reach and profile of those schools, are worth investigating.

Interactions Between Policy Effects, Population Characteristics and the Tax-Benefit System: An Illustration Using Child Poverty and Child Related Policies in Romania and the Czech Republic.

We investigate the impact of the Romanian and Czech family policy systems on the poverty risk of families with children. We focus on separating out the effects of policy design itself and size of benefits from the interaction between policies and population characteristics. We find that interactions between population characteristics, the wider tax benefit system and child related policies are pervasive and large. Both population characteristics and the wider tax-benefit environment can dramatically alter the antipoverty effect of a given set of policies.

Social assistance performance in Central and Eastern Europe: A pre-transfer post-transfer comparison

The anti-poverty impact of national social assistance programmes in eight Central and Eastern European countries is examined using data from the European Union-Survey of Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC). Results indicate that social assistance programmes achieve only limited poverty reduction, while spending a significant amount of their resources on the non-poor. The more extensive and generous programmes achieve higher effectiveness in reducing poverty. Efficiency on the other hand appears to be linked only to programme size and not to benefit levels. Unlike Western Europe, no trade-off between effectiveness and efficiency could be detected.

Who benefits from the ‘hidden welfare state’? The distributional effects of personal income tax expenditure in six countries

We use a tax-benefit microsimulation model to investigate the size and distributional effects of tax allowances and tax credits in six European countries. Results indicate that tax allowances and tax credits benefit large sections of the population, not just individuals with high incomes and that together they amount to substantial amounts of foregone revenue. However, with some (important) exceptions, their effect on inequality is small. Tax allowances are generally regressive while tax credits tend to be proportional or mildly progressive. Yet, the redistributive effect of tax allowances and tax credits works in complex and often unanticipated ways. Other features of the income tax system (such as the tax rate schedule or the definition of the taxpayer unit) are as important in determining the size and direction of the redistributive effect as the characteristics of the tax allowances/tax credits themselves. Even instruments inversely linked to taxable income can be more beneficial to high-income households in some contexts. Consequently, tax allowances and tax credits appear ill-suited to target resources towards households in the bottom part of the income distribution.