several types of cash transfers are covered housing benefits unemployment and incapacity benefits family and parental leave benefits and pension benefits two different sets of measures are used to capture social cash transfers a series of measures of aggregate social spending per capita on each type of cash transfer and a series of measures of social cash transfer payment rates measured as the average payment rate for a twoparent family moreover the estimates are based on two indicators of child poverty the relative poverty rate calculated on the basis of a floatingpoverty line i e which changes annually but therefore ignores the upward or downward variations in living standards that are absorbed by the annual variations of the poverty line to take this into account the estimates are also made using a poverty rate obtained with the poverty line and kept constant over the years after adjusting for changes in price levels