Le politiche sociali

The paper focuses on Steve’s contributions to the analysis of social se-curity and social expenditure, trying to identify the qualifying aspects of his investigation. According to Steve, the expansion of social ex-penditure is one of the most significant historical event of the post-war period. We will distinguish the redistributive and the allocative effects of social expenditure. As to the former, we will concentrate on the fi-nancing of social security and on the incidence of social security con-tributions. Since the social security system redistributes resources across the entire population, it is an additional tool to pursue horizon-tal equity and the justification for its financing with social security con-tributions only is weakened. Taxation could be a better tool as long as the tax system is structured in such a way that it can achieve the redis-tributive goals attributed to it. At to the latter, we will discuss the choice between in-kind and cash transfers and the role of public and private service provision. In Steve’s view, the success of the welfare state depends on the high quality of public good provision, on access to positional goods not depending on individual income and on budget balance, in order to avoid rising inflation.