Suchergebnisse

The article analyses the redistributive effect attained by personal income
tax, social security contributions and social benefits in Slovenia and
Croatia. The redistributive effect is decomposed first to reveal
progressivity and horizontal inequity effects, and further to show
contributions of different tax and benefit instruments. Even though both
countries started from the same socioeconomic background two decades ago, the
current results reveal divergence that is a consequence of diverse
development during this period. The results indicate that Croatia experienced
significantly higher pre-fiscal income inequality and lower redistributive
effect than Slovenia. Horizontal inequity effects, though, were higher in
Slovenia than in Croatia. In both countries, the meanstested social benefits
exerted an over-proportionate influence on the vertical effect, suggesting a
strong impact of the welfare state on income position of their residents, but
also induced a large amount of horizontal inequity. In Slovenia, the
non-means-tested benefits slightly increased income inequality.

In the article, we model R&D as a major endogenous growth element in a small
open economy general equilibrium framework and consider several R&D policy
scenarios for Slovenia. Increase of the share of sectoral investment in R&D
that is deductible from the corporate income tax and increase of government
spending on R&D turned out to be the most effective suggested policy
measures. While the former policy measure is still followed in part by an
undesired transfer of the tax relief to dividends, a moderate increase of
government spending on R&D boosts long-run productivity in the economy, thus
increasing the future value of firms, which is reflected in a desired
dividend increase. The households that would gain more utility from such
policy scenarios are those with more skilled and highly skilled labour, but
not the very top earners in the economy.