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| Recent changes in the distribution of the social wage | | Author(s) | Tom Sefton |
| Corporate Author | ESRC Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion - CASE, Suntory-Toyota International Centres for Economics and Related Disciplines - STICERD, London School of Economics and Political Science |
| Publisher | STICERD, London, 2002 |
| Pages | 66 pp (CASEpaper 62) |
| Source | Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion, London School of Economics, Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE. |
| Keywords | Services ; Public expenditure ; Social economics ; Poverty ; Longitudinal surveys. |
| Annotation | About one third of all government spending is on welfare services, such as the National Health Service (NHS), state education, social housing, and social care services. The value of these services can be thought of as an income in kind - a "social wage" - that represents a substantial addition to people's cash incomes, especially those at the bottom of the income distribution. This paper uses data from several large-scale household surveys, to produce estimates of the value of the social wage for 1996/97 and 2000/01. It also makes comparisons and estimates from previous work back to 1979. Results show that people from the poorest households receive a greater share of benefits in kind from welfare services than those in wealthier households, and that this "pro-poor" bias has risen gradually over the long term. Spending on welfare services has grown faster since 1996/97 than in the past, with an incremental shift in favour of lower income groups across all major services. Although these changes have reinforced the redistributional effects of tax and benefits policies over the same period, they have not prevented inequality from rising. (RH). |
| Accession Number | CPA-030120206 B |
| Classmark | I: WN8: W4: W6: 3J |
Data © Centre for Policy on Ageing |
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| ...from the Ageinfo database published by Centre for Policy on Ageing. |
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