The effectiveness of social policy targeted at households with disabled children in Flanders: does the existing set of social policies succeed in reducing the poverty risk of disabled children?

Families with disabled children combine both direct and indirect costs that likely have a negative impact on their poverty risk. First, they face higher direct costs due to the child's medical and care needs. Second, they face higher indirect costs as they need to provide more care which jeopardises the parents' engagement in the labour market. On top of that, families with disabled children often have a lower socioeconomic status than families without disabled children, increasing their poverty risk independent of having a disabled child. Many Western welfare states have implemented a set of benefits and services for families with disabled children to mitigate these direct and indirect costs. However, we lack insight in the actual effectiveness of these social policies in reaching this objective. Therefore, this research project aims to evaluate to what extent the existing set of social policies for families with disabled children in Flanders succeeds in reducing their poverty risk by increasing family income directly or indirectly. Specifically, the project will work on three related research strands. First, we will explore the non-take-up of social support for disabled children as this phenomenon can substantially impede the actual effectiveness of social policies. Second, we will look into the direct poverty reducing effect of the existing cash allowances for families with disabled children, in particular the supplemental child benefit. Finally, the indirect impact will be investigated via the causal effect of the presence of disabled children on parental employment. The budget requested within this BOF-KP project will be used to finance a data request with the Belgian Crossroads Bank for Social Security for the extension of an existing administrative dataset. Obtaining longitudinal employment information, information from the Ministry of Education and from the tax administration, will allow us to shed light on the three research strands. We will apply quantitative methods on this unique administrative dataset.

Keywords:CHILD POVERTY, CHILDHOOD DISABILITY, INCOME TARGETING, NON TAKE UP

Disciplines:Social policy