korpi and palme suggested the existence of a paradox in that benefits targeted at the poor achieve less redistribution than universal benefits the main reason being that universal benefits receive wider popular support so that their payment rate can be set at a higher level than the targeted ones recent evidence suggests however that targeting is no longer necessarily associated with lower levels of redistribution kenworthy marx salanauskaite and verbist jacques and noel similarly with short time series data from to diris vandenbroucke and verbist ooj found that increased propoorness leads often to lower poverty rates but that the effect sizes are quite modest and strongly dependent on how targeting is defined