Ricerc@Sapienza

European welfare states are characterized by a different amount of resources devoted to social policies,
despite an ongoing convergence of national policies. The Public Choice literature and some empirical analysis on the
efficiency of the public sector point out that higher levels of government spending are often related to greater
inefficiencies. Can this relationship be considered general? What does it emerge from the empirical analysis of social

Based on the construction of two indicators to assess the relative
effectiveness and efficiency of European welfare policies, we show that the
variability of efficiency cannot be explained only by the amount of resources
devoted to social policies but also by the institutional environment. The OLS
regression shows that institutional variables- such as accountability and
honesty of public officials- have high significant effects on the efficiency.