Equal opportunities for children: Social welfare expenditures in the English-speaking countries and Western Europe

To construct our measures of welfare state expenditures we use data sources compiled by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), in particular the OECD Social Expenditure Database, which includes many categories of cash and in-kind social benefits—old age and disability, occupational injury, sickness, unemployment, family benefits and services, public health expenditures, and housing benefits, among others. We derive employer-provided benefits and aggregate tax expenditures from data compiled by the OECD and the Employee Benefit Research Institute (EBRI) in the United States. Microdata concerning household market income in the ten nations come from the LIS database, which now contains household income data files for 29 nations, covering the years 1967 to 2002. The LIS data give us good estimates of the distribution of cash expenditures, and the income and earnings data enable us to estimate the payroll, property, and sales tax burdens across income classes. We begin with the household, which, for cross-national comparisons of inequality, is the only comparable income-sharing unit available for most nations, including those discussed here. From this we derive a measure of adjusted income per child.