Wie heeft profijt van het overheidsbeleid?/Kinderopvang in Zweden en België (Vlaanderen)

Childcare is promoted at the national and European level as a policy instrument par excellence to simultaneously reconcile work and family duties and increase female employment rates. As a consequence, European governments increasingly deploy resources to subsidise childcare services. The main goal...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inMens en maatschappij Vol. 88; no. 1; p. 5
Main Authors Van Lancker, Wim, Ghysels, Joris
Format Journal Article
LanguageDutch
Published Amsterdam Amsterdam University Press 01.03.2013
Subjects
Child care
Comparative analysis
Government subsidies
Social policy
Sweden
Belgium
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Summary:Childcare is promoted at the national and European level as a policy instrument par excellence to simultaneously reconcile work and family duties and increase female employment rates. As a consequence, European governments increasingly deploy resources to subsidise childcare services. The main goal of this paper is to unravel who benefits from this government investment on childcare. First, we look into the social distribution of childcare use in European countries. Second, we depart from these results to analyse which income groups are the main benefici- aries of government investment in childcare in two countries (Flanders/Belgium and Sweden), and how the policy design contributes to the outcomes. We find that in almost all European welfare states childcare use is biased against the lowest income groups. Moreover, our case studies learn that the policy design plays a crucial role in these distributional outcomes. In Flanders, government investment disproportionally benefits the higher income families while the opposite is true for Sweden. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]
ISSN:0025-9454
1876-2816