child poverty.pdf

5th International Research Conference on Social Security Warsaw, 5-7 March 2007 Social security and the labour market: A mismatch? Child Poverty, Children Allowances and Labor Force Participation The Case of Israel Abraham DORON Berwald School of Social Work and Social Welfare Hebrew University Israel International Social Security Association Research Programme Case postale 1, CH-1211 Geneva 22 Fax: +41 22 799 8509 e-mail: issarc@ Web: Child Poverty, Children Allowances and Labor Force Participation The Case of Israel By Abraham Doron Summary The paper deals with the dilemma of preventing poverty among families with children, in particular of large families with four children or more, by maintaining a system of generous children allowances, and at the same time assuring adequate incentives for parents of children in these families to participate in the labor force. The risk of children of large families to grow up in poverty is significantly higher than in small families. In the case of Israel, poverty among large families with four children has increased significantly in recent years. To increase incentives to work among these families the rather generous children allowance program was recently redesigned. The policy problem with the redesigned systems remains however how to keep a proper balance between the two different goals. The major shift in social protection policies pursued in the last decade by almost all advanced industrial countries, including Israel among them, was to introduce work activation programs. The activation programs were conceived as a mechanism to change the existing social security programs from being passive to becoming more active in promoting participation in work of recipients of social security benefits. In general the trend was to establish closer links between the entitlement to many social security benefits and part