Comparative Analysis of Family Benefits in Germany, Belgium, France, Great Britain and Luxembourg

In an outlook on the social Europe, one may wonder how important differences are between the existing national rules for social protection in the different European countries, how far does one have to go before reaching a sufficiently close level of proximity where the principle of subsidiarity is accepted. That is what a recent study 1 has tried to do -by focusing only on the monetary benefits of the family policy- carried out by the team Analyse Dynamique des Effets des Politiques Sociales (ADEPS), for the French Caisse Nationale des Allocations Familiales, in collaboration with CEPS/INSTEAD in Luxembourg, CSB in Antwerp and ESRI in Dublin. It is not sufficient to only analyse the global generosity levels in the different countries in order to compare the national family policies across countries. It is also necessary to compare the effects of these policies. The evaluation of the effects of family policies, which should be done with regard to their implicit or explicit objectives, gives rise to continuous and ill defined discussions. It seems to us that the debate revolves round the difficult question of the definition of neutrality often attributed to family policies. That is why, in the first part, the paper discusses this concept and, as a second step, introduces the methodological approach which lies more classically on the notion of redistributive effect. Finally, in a third part, we comment on the results of the five countries comparative analysis. The analysis of the concept of neutrality applied to family policy as part of redistribution does not conclude with a proper definition of neutrality or equity but shows the ambiguities of the notion insofar as these definitions can lead to contradictory systems of benefits : equal benefits, benefits increasing with cost of children or in favour of the least well-off.