Fiscal welfare in Europe: a state of the art

Nathalie Morel (1) , Chloé Touzet (2, 3) , Michaël Zemmour (4)

1 CEE - Centre d'études européennes et de politique comparée (Sciences Po, CNRS)
2 University of Oxford
3 LIEPP - Laboratoire interdisciplinaire d'évaluation des politiques publiques (Sciences Po)
4 CLERSÉ - Centre Lillois d’Études et de Recherches Sociologiques et Économiques - UMR 8019

Since the 1990s, welfare state reform has been at the core of much of the welfare state research. From an analysis of reform pressures, to an understanding of welfare state resilience, to a focus on reform trajectories, the literature has highlighted the role of politics, of institutions and of ideas in understanding processes and trajectories of reform. This paper aims to contribute to the literature on welfare state reform through a different angle, by analysing reform processes through the development of specific policy instruments, namely tax expenditures for social purposes (hereafter called social tax expenditures, or STEs), which has remained a blind spot in much of the welfare state literature.

Keywords: welfare state; tax expenditures; tax

Domains: Economics and Finance; Sociology

Nathalie Morel, Chloé Touzet, Michaël Zemmour. Fiscal welfare in Europe: a state of the art. 2016. ⟨hal-02187913⟩