English
Engaging with fiscal welfare leads to a reassessment of existing understandings of welfare state trajectories in Europe, with regard to their political, institutional, or distributional dimensions. Yet most of the recent literature on social tax expenditures focuses on the US. The present article reviews the theoretical and empirical knowledge on fiscal welfare in Europe. Based on a survey of the emerging literature on the topic, it presents the potential drivers and effects of the use of social tax expenditures specific to the European context.