Impact of expenditure on social assistance on household income at the regional level in Poland

Abstract

The main aim of the paper is a statistical analysis of changes in household income distribution at the regional level in Poland taking into account the impact of government spending on social assistance. Various linear models (incorporating relations for spline functions) and the vector autoregression models (VAR) were used in the research. The linear models formulated for voivodships (NUTS 2) contained a dichotomous variable with values dependent on the existence of social programmes introduced by the Polish government in 2016. An independent variable representing expenditure per capita on social assistance specified for the national level was also used. The results for these models were compared with the findings of both microsimulation studies obtained on the basis of the Household Budget Surveys (HBS) and the total assessment of the social programmes, and they indicate a significant influence of social assistance expenditure on the amounts of available income. The calculations were conducted using data from the Statistics Poland databases: Local Data Bank (and in particular, data from the Polish HBS for the years 2000–2018) and from the Macroeconomic Data Bank, and from the annual reports on the implementation of the state budget. They were performed by means of the R-project environment and R-commander overlay, using the lm function as well as the vars module for the R-project environment. The study also involved using the Gretl package.