instance, specific social welfare programs may be intended to support families with children, but the allocation of those resources among children or parents could vary significantly.

**Several approaches in the literature rely on household-level data and apply various methodologies to estimate intra-household resource allocation.** These methods usually involve assuming equal sharing, per capita allocation, or considering specific demographic factors influencing household resource distribution, such as adult equivalent scales. However, it is crucial to recognize that these assumptions are not universally applicable, and the actual distribution of resources within households may differ based on cultural norms, income dynamics, and individual preferences. For example, the equal sharing approach is generally not suitable for examining the gender or child impact of taxes and transfers since it overlooks the reality that resources within a household are not always equally distributed across genders or among adults and children. Therefore, while analyzing fiscal incidence at the household level is pragmatic, it is essential to acknowledge the limitations and uncertainties arising from making assumptions about household resource allocation. As research progresses, efforts to refine methodologies and gather more granular data will aid in developing a more accurate understanding of how fiscal policies impact individuals within diverse household settings.

**Prior initiatives have aimed at customizing the CEQ methodology specifically to examine child poverty.** Notably, the CEQ for Children (CEQ4C) approach, as described by Cuesta et al. in 2020 and Bournokova et al. in 2022, tailors the fiscal incidence analysis to focus on child poverty-related policies and public finances. The CEQ4C approach includes three elements: (a) identify child-relevant budgets, (b) use multidimensional child poverty metrics, and c) take children as the unit of analysis.

**Given the Bulgaria data available, identifying a child-relevant budget is not a trivial task.** This is more straightforward on education spending as they directly benefit children of different cohorts. However, many of the other benefits (health, social assistance) combine benefits aiming to reach children and benefit children indirectly.  On the revenue side (i.e., taxes), it is even more difficult as we do not have expenditure patterns at the individual level. Additionally, in our analysis, we are interested in child-specific budgets and fiscal measures (either transfers or taxes) that can indirectly affect children or interact with families with children. In-kind transfers, especially education, are critical for children. However, the household survey does not allow to identify children attending the public school system, so some assumptions were made for this differentiation between public and private schooling. Nevertheless, we attempt to identify child-relevant budgets (see Table 1).

**As for the child poverty indicator, we use AROP among children, as this is the official poverty measure used in the country for monitoring and targeting purposes.** This is also used for comparability issues, that is, to have comparable metrics with the previous CEQ, which uses AROP as the primary measure. Moreover, to identify the changes in welfare post-fiscal policy, we fix the AROP poverty line. Therefore, the welfare distribution changes due to fiscal policy but is compared against a fixed threshold or benchmark. As mentioned above, we abstract from multidimensional poverty measures among children and literacy, stunting, and other non-monetary measures.

**Given the nature of the HBS and EU-SILC data, which collects household income and expenditure, this analysis is first done at the individual level, assuming adult equivalence scales, and then at the household level; with the latter approach, we identify the subgroups of households, rather than the subgroup of children that bear the burden of fiscal policy and deserve more policy attention** . Understanding the underlying child/adult relationships requires information on individual expenditure

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