published as 'Targeting and Child Poverty' in: Social Choice and Welfare, 2012, 39(4), 783-808
There is a large empirical literature on policy measures targeted at children but surprisingly very little theoretical foundation to ground the debate on the optimality of the different instruments. In the present paper, we examine the merit of targeting children through two general policies, namely selective commodity taxation and cash transfer to family with children. We consider a household that comprises an adult and a child. The household behavior is described by the maximization of the adult’s utility function, which depends on the child’s welfare, subject to a budget constraint. The relative effects of a price subsidy and of a cash benefit on child welfare are then derived. In particular, it is shown that ‘favorable’ distortions from the price subsidies may allow to redistribute toward the child. The framework is extended to account for possible paternalistic preferences of the State. Finally, it is shown that, in contrast to the traditional view, well-chosen subsidies can be more cost effective than cash transfers in alleviating child poverty.
We use cookies to provide you with an optimal website experience. This includes cookies that are necessary for the operation of the site as well as cookies that are only used for anonymous statistical purposes, for comfort settings or to display personalized content. You can decide for yourself which categories you want to allow. Please note that based on your settings, you may not be able to use all of the site's functions.
Cookie settings
These necessary cookies are required to activate the core functionality of the website. An opt-out from these technologies is not available.
In order to further improve our offer and our website, we collect anonymous data for statistics and analyses. With the help of these cookies we can, for example, determine the number of visitors and the effect of certain pages on our website and optimize our content.