ABSTRACT
Poverty still constitutes a wide-spread phenomenon in highly-developed welfare states. Most recent comparative analyses of poverty in industrial welfare states are based on the concept of relative income poverty. In all industrialized welfare states, a considerable share of the population live in relative income poverty, yet with a large variation across countries. Most studies analyzing the redistributional impact of the welfare state are based on so-called Beckerman ratios. The strong correlation between market income poverty rates and the redistributional impact of the welfare state points to one critical limitation of Beckerman's method. As the basic safety net of the welfare state, minimum income schemes play a decisive role for the alleviation of poverty. International variations in poverty profiles are not only driven by variations in the effectiveness of welfare state redistribution, but also by variations in socio-demographic and socio-economic structures, as these factors put different strains on income transfer schemes.
