EPCI (Economie politique du changement institutionnel) Seminar

Du 07/10/2014 de 16:30 à 18:00

MSE (106-112, blv de l'Hôpital - Room 19) 75013 Paris

PALME Joakim (UPPSALA UNIVERSITY, SWEDEN)

The Paradox of Redistribution Revisited

Welfare States come with different aims. To reduce poverty and inequality figures as a prominent goal, especially in times of rising inequalities. How do we design welfare states to work well as strategies of equality? The ‘Paradox of Redistribution’ (Korpi and Palme, 1998) stated that the more we target benefits at the poor only and the more concerned we are with creating equality via equal public transfers to all, the less likely we are to reduce poverty and inequality. Comparative data for a number of OECD countries concerning the situation in the mid-1980s appeared to be congruent with this hypothesis. More recently, a series of studies seem to call this finding into question. The aim of the present paper is not only to check the validity of some of these claims but also to discuss the political economy argument behind the paradox, examine measurement problems and outline alternative approaches to the study of the relationship between the welfare state and equality. It is argued that we can learn a lot more by (i) putting the generosity and distributive profile of benefit programs into the context of the political economy of the welfare state, (ii) being more specific about program design and target populations, (iii) broadening the perspective of policy instruments, and (iv) extending the accounting framework in order to capture also the 'horizontal' and 'risk' redistributions in addition to the 'vertical' one.