‘Profijt van de overheid III’ describes and analyses the distributional effects of government expenditures (benefit incidence) and government taxes (tax incidence) as far as they are tied to goods and services. The next section discusses the aims of the study in more detail viz to give an insight into the distribution effects of tied income transfers in the bid to improve the effectiveness of government policy. Section 3 summarizes the distribution of tied income transfers in 1991. When added to or deducted from secondary income, tied income transfers form the tertiary income, an indicator which gives a fuller insight into the income distribution process. This study is a repeat of an earlier study and thus enables the distribution effects to be compared over time. Section 4 summarizes the results of this temporal comparison, focusing particular attention on changes in distribution which may be due to policy changes. Few policy conclusions can be drawn from distribution changes in themselves, and the aims of government policy must be taken into account when evaluating distribution effects. In this study it was decided to compare the distributions of government spending with reference distributions, which indicate the distribution of transfers on the basis of the target groups of government policy. The results of the comparison of reference and observed distributions are summarized in section 5. The summary ends with a number of conclusions in section 6 which place the findings of this study in a policy perspective. (Author/publisher)
Samenvatting