Fighting Child Poverty in Spain by Moving Towards European Standards: A Microsimulation-Based Case Study
Submitted: 2026-02-22
|Accepted: 2026-05-12
|Published: 2026-05-19
Copyright (c) 2026 Luis Ayala, Olga Cantó, Marina Romaguera-de-la-Cruz, Dmitry Petrov
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
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Keywords:
Child poverty, Spain, Microsimulation, Universal transfers
Supporting agencies:
Junta de Comunidades de Castilla-La Mancha
Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación
Abstract:
Poverty in Spain is widespread among children, and its incidence has recently shown a strong upward trend. The aim of this paper is twofold: to assess the impact of the Spanish tax and benefit system on current child poverty rates and, in that context, to simulate the potential distributive consequences of implementing a variety of family transfer schemes using an EU-wide static microsimulation tool (EUROMOD). We simulate and study the effects of choosing different policies: a redesign of the current means-tested child benefit in terms of amount and age distribution, a reform of the existing income tax relief making it refundable and the addition of a taxable Universal Child Benefit (UCB) to the system. Our results indicate that several of the proposed reforms could generate substantial reductions in child poverty.
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