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The main aim of this paper has been to summarize the impact of noncash income–health and health education benefits, and imputed rent‐on living standards, income distribution and poverty in seven nations at the beginning of the 1980s using the Luxembourg Income Study database. Our results do not give rise to a pattern of national differences in poverty rates or income inequality which are markedly different from that which emerges from previous LIS research based on cash income alone. While these results may be sensitive to the techniques used to measure and value noncash benefits in this paper, it appears that noncash income reinforces the redistributive impact or conventional (cash) tax‐transfer mechanisms rather than acting to offset them in any major way.
Smeeding et al. (Wed,) studied this question.