Redistributive effects of social benefits in Poland vs analogous effects in other European countries.

The aim of this paper is to analyse redistributive effect of social benefits in Poland in comparison with analogous effects in a dozen or so other European countries. The Consortium of Household Panels for European Socio-economic Research (CHER) database in 1994-2000 is the source of data for the study. The empirical results demonstrates that Poland, as one of the Central and East European countries, which inherited from socialist system generous social benefits, is characterized by the second highest redistributive effect (the average value equal to 44.49%). Moreover, the analysis confirms that Poland is distinguished for the fact that redistributive effect of benefits is mainly a consequence of very high average benefit rate with respect to original income (the average value of this variable equal to 57.22%) and not high benefit regressivity with respect to this category of income (the average value of benefit regressivity index equal to 0.9091). Redistributive effect of aggregated benefits in Poland is made up predominantly of redistributive effect of all types of pensions (the average value equal to 30.60%), but in fact this phenomenon can not be attributed only to Poland, but to all other countries as well. The inequality of gross income in Poland results from both original income and benefits - Poland has one of the lowest contribution of original income to the inequality of gross income (the average value equal to 89.83%) and one of the highest contribution of benefits to the inequality of gross income (the average value equal to 10.17%).