Suchergebnisse

The paper analyses the incentive and the redistributive effects of introducing either a family based or an individual in-work benefit in Italy. The reforms are financed through the abolition of the existing tax credit targeted at inactive people. In-work benefits are means-tested transfers given to individuals conditional on their employment status. The results show an increase in the labour supply of both women in couples (with larger responses to the individual in-work benefit than the family based benefit) and lone mothers. Most of the behavioural changes take place among the poorest individuals with important redistributive effects.

This paper analyses the effects of implementing a family-based and an individual in-work benefit in the southern European countries using EUROMOD, the EU-wide tax-benefit microsimulation model. In-work benefits are means-tested cash transfers given to individuals, through the tax system, conditional on their employment status. They are intended to enhance the incentives to accept work and redistribute resources to low income groups. The family-based in-work benefits seem to be more redistributive, in particular in Italy and Portugal, but the presence of extended families does not enable such policies to be well targeted on the very poorest, especially in Spain. Individual policies lead to better incentives to work than family-based in-work benefits, in particular for Spanish and Italian women in couples whose labour market participation is far below the European average.

The Italian Great Recession has a double-dip pattern. After the start of the global financial crisis, Italy experienced a second serious recession in 2011 because of the sovereign debt crisis. The reaction of Italian governments was mild at the beginning and more convinced since the start of the sovereign debt crisis in 2011. Adopted policies contributed to realign public finances at a sustainable level, while household real income decreased by 13 per cent and quite unevenly along the household income distribution. The medium-term outlook is still uncertain: a great deal depends on the capacity of the Italian economy to reduce the level of public debt and to return to sustained economic growth, which has been very weak for more than a decade.

Over the last few years concern for income inequality in European countries has increased remarkably. In this context, taxation is an important redistributive instrument and we investigate the redistributive role of direct taxes. We focus on the EU-15 countries and the evolution over the period 1998-2008, using EUROMOD, the EU-wide tax-benefit model. The research aim of this paper is twofold. First, we investigate empirically whether there is a link between pre-tax income inequality and redistribution through taxes. Second we hereby test whether there is a relationship between progressivity and the average tax level, the two building stones of the redistributive impact of taxes.

This paper aims to provide an introduction to the current state of the art of EUROMOD, the European Union tax-benefit microsimulation model. It explains the original motivations for building a multi-country EU-wide model and summarises its current organisation. It provides an overview of EUROMOD components, covering its policy scope, the input data, the validation process and some technical aspects such as the tax-benefit programming language and the user interface. The paper also reviews some recent applications of EUROMOD and, finally, considers future developments.

AbstractAlthough the effect of fiscal drag is well‐studied in the industrialised world, empirical evidence from developing economies remains limited. Against this backdrop, this study aims to explore the effect of fiscal drag on income distribution and work incentives. To this end, the study employs SOUTHMOD, the tax‐benefit microsimulation model, for six African countries: Ethiopia, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda, Mozambique, and Zambia. Three important conclusions are drawn from our empirical investigation. First, in the absence of proper tax parameter adjustment, the distribution of fiscal drag is determined by the liability progression of personal income tax in the pre‐inflation period. Second, the impact of fiscal drag on the redistributive effects and progressivity of personal income taxes is differentiated among countries. On the one hand, it reduces the progressivity of personal income tax in Ethiopia, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zambia; on the other hand, it improves progressivity in Mozambique. However, it decreases the redistributive effect of personal income tax only in Ethiopia, Tanzania, and Uganda. Third, fiscal drag reduces financial work incentives to increase earnings in all countries. Addressing fiscal drag becomes very crucial considering the soaring inflation due to the war between Ukraine and Russia.

This paper analyses the extent to which the Italian welfare system provides monetary compensation for those who lost their earnings due to the lockdown imposed by the government in order to contain the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020. In assessing first-order effects of the businesses temporarily shut down and the government's policy measures on household income, counterfactual scenarios are simulated with EUROMOD, the EU-wide microsimulation model, integrated with information on the workers who the lockdown is more likely to affect. This paper provides timely evidence on the differing degrees of relative and absolute resilience of the household incomes of the individuals affected by the lockdown. These arise from the variations in the protection offered by the tax-benefit system, coupled with personal and household circumstances of the individuals at risk of income loss.

Western countries' income tax system exempts the return from investing in owner-occupied housing. Returns from other investments are instead taxed, thus distorting households' portfolio choices, although it is argued that housing property taxation might act as a counterbalance. Based on data drawn from the Statistics of Income and Living Conditions and the UK Family Resources Survey, and building on the tax benefit model EUROMOD, we provide novel evidence on the interplay of income and property taxation in budgetary, efficiency and equity terms in eight European countries. Results reveal that, even accounting for recurrent housing property taxation, a sizeable 'homeownership bias' i.e. a lighter average and marginal taxation for homeownership investment, is embedded in current tax systems, and displays heterogeneous distributional profiles across different countries. Housing property taxation represents only a partial correction towards neutrality.

Abstract
Redistribution is usually understood in terms of income, as a resource used to rank individuals as well as determine tax liabilities or benefit entitlements. Yet, it is increasingly argued that more prominence should be given to the joint distribution of income and wealth and interest into the taxation of wealth for redistributive purposes has largely increased. By including income and wealth data from the Eurosystem Household Finance and Consumption Survey into the tax–benefit microsimulation model EUROMOD, we add two novel aspects to the literature. First, we include the analysis of taxes on wealth and wealth transfers. Second, we evaluate redistributive effects of tax–benefit systems against the joint income–wealth distribution instead of income only. We show that expressing living standards in terms of both income and wealth results in considerable reranking of individuals, which in turn leads to a lower redistributive impact of tax–benefit systems than is traditionally considered.

Abstract
We estimate the marginal cost of public funds (MCF) as an overall indicator of the efficiency of tax-benefit systems and their reforms. The novelty of our work is the calculation of a MCF indicator fully based on empirical micro-data representative of the Italian population. This indicator combines the incentives embodied in the tax-benefit system at the intensive and extensive margins with the respective elasticities of labour supply at both margins. Our results first show the importance of taking into account the heterogeneity of the population with women (both single and in couples) facing a more inefficient system than men. Second, our micro-data based indicator shows the potential bias of MCF indicators based on stylized and hypothetical measures of work incentives.

We explore the prospects for using the Eurosystem Household Finance and Consumption Survey (HFCS) dataset as an underlying micro-database for the EU taxbenefit model, EUROMOD. This will allow expanding the policy domains currently covered in EUROMOD with dimensions like wealth taxation, incentives for wealth accumulation and asset tests determining benefit eligibility. As the HFCS only contains gross income amounts which are not suitable for distributive analysis, the purpose of this paper is to derive net incomes by simulating the gross-to-net transition with EUROMOD taking into account all important details of the social security and personal income tax system. In order to identify the issues and illustrate their importance a trial database for Belgium and Italy is constructed.

The financial and economic crisis which started in the late 2000s and the fiscal consolidation measures to counter the subsequent government budget deficits have an impact on household income distribution and macroeconomic recovery. We consider the austerity measures in relation to their distributional impact and the potential channels through which fiscal consolidation can affect economic growth. We find notable variation in the size, composition and effects of fiscal consolidation. Richer households tend to bear a greater burden in most countries but spending cuts are more likely to affect liquidity constrained households casting doubts over previous findings in the macro-economic literature about the effectiveness of such measures. This suggests the need to consider more disaggregated evidence to reach robust policy conclusions.