Les effets des réformes des dépenses sociales et fiscales consacrées aux enfants depuis 2008 : une évaluation à l'aide de la microsimulation

How have the socio-fiscal reforms introduced since 2008 modified public spending on children under family policy? What effects have they had on the standard of living of families with children according to family configuration, number of children and place in the standard of living scale? To precisely assess these redistributive effects, microsimulation is a particularly suitable tool. Two exercises to quantify the effects of the reforms were carried out: the first on typical households, using a model; a second on a representative sample of the entire population, using the Ines microsimulation model. The first highlights that the cumulative amount of socio-fiscal expenditure per child exhibits a strong variability depending on family configurations, the number and age of children, and the total household activity income (deviations ranging from one to seven). With a family configuration and a given number of children, the profile of the curve of public expenditure per child as a function of earned income is disrupted due to the stacking of different social and fiscal measures related to children, which partly overlap but have different purposes. The microsimulation exercise carried out using the Ines model tends to show that the reforms of family benefits that have taken place since 2008 have resulted in a transfer of universal maintenance services to targeted maintenance services and mainly under conditions of resources. Moreover, within all social and fiscal spending on children, there has been a shift from spending under family policy to spending on the borderline of social policy and family policy. The socio-fiscal reforms improved the situation of single-parent families and the poorest families, but worsened the situation of families belonging to the 30% of the wealthiest households.