Suchergebnisse

Most studies using microsimulation techniques have considered the effect of potential reforms, but only regarding income distribution. However, it has become increasingly recognised, both at the academic and political level, that focusing purely on income provides a limited picture of social progress. We illustrate how ex-ante policy evaluation can be performed in terms of richer concepts of individual well-being, such as subjective life satisfaction and equivalent incomes. Our analysis makes use of EUROMOD, the EU-wide tax-benefit microsimulation model, along with 2013 EUSILC data for Sweden, which for the first time provides information on subjective wellbeing. Our results show that the effect of potential reforms varies widely depending on the well-being concept used in the evaluation. We discuss the normative questions that are raised by this finding.

A series of social benefits targeting vulnerable groups, such as the elderly population, has been implemented in Ecuador over the last few decades. Elderly adults living in vulnerable conditions and not affiliated with social security are entitled to noncontributory pension assistance under the Human Development Transfer program. However, over one quarter of old-age beneficiaries still live in poverty and the recent fall in oil prices has put increasing pressure on government expenditures to deliver such schemes. This paper aims to assess the current needs of old-age adults based on expenditure data, and makes use of microsimulation techniques to evaluate the effect of covering those needs through an increase in pension assistance. Our results show that increasing pension assistance to match the level of the poverty line in Ecuador would reduce elderly poverty by 40% and would take 18% of old-age beneficiaries out of poverty. We analyze the effect of additional hypothetical reforms and discuss the importance of using microsimulation techniques, in particular to assess the effect of budget neutral reforms in a macroeconomic environment with low oil prices.

AbstractIn the face of increased uncertainty and a slow economic recovery, it is crucial to protect populations from the effects of systemic crises beyond the narrow goal of poverty reduction. In Ecuador, social assistance programs had little effect in reducing earnings losses caused by the COVID‐19 pandemic, leading to a renewed discussion on the implementation of a universal basic income (UBI). This study evaluates the potential impact of social assistance reforms using tax‐benefit microsimulation techniques. Four simulated counterfactual reforms are assessed, ranging from an extension of current social assistance programs to the implementation of UBI, which would replace existing programs and be partially funded through progressive personal income tax and social security contributions. Our findings demonstrate that poverty and inequality would decrease significantly under the more generous UBI scenarios. This research contributes to the ongoing debate on the potential benefits of UBI in reducing poverty and inequality and emphasizes the importance of considering alternative social assistance reforms in the face of growing systemic challenges.

Tax and benefit systems play an important role in determining work incentives at both, the extensive and the intensive margin of labour supply. The aim of this paper is to provide a comprehensive comparative analysis of work incentives in the EU. Our analysis makes use of microsimulation techniques and representative household surveys from all 28 EU countries to compare the distribution of short- and long-term participation tax rates and marginal effective tax rates across population subgroups. We focus on people currently in work and characterise the population facing low work incentives in each country. Our results highlight the large variation in the distribution of work incentives across EU countries, explained not only by differences in the design of tax-benefit systems, but also by the characteristics of the labour force across countries. Unemployment insurance benefits contribute substantially to short-term participation tax rates and explain on average 20 percentage point difference between work incentives of short- vs. long-term unemployment. Our analysis further highlights the need to use microdata to study differences across countries in terms of the population subgroups facing low incentives to work with the aim to inform the policy debate on potential reforms to make work pay.

The idea of a common unemployment benefit system for the European Monetary Union (EMU) has provoked increasing interest in both the political and academic spheres because of its potential to smooth fluctuations in income across member states and to strengthen income security for the unemployed. In this paper, we simulate two hypothetical negative employment shocks and make use of the microsimulation model EUROMOD to explore the implications for income protection of the introduction of an EMU unemployment insurance (EMU-UI) scheme, for a selected number of countries of the Monetary Union. Our results show that the EMU-UI has the potential to reduce the risk of poverty for those affected by the negative employment shock and to have an additional positive effect on within-country income stabilisation, although the effects of the EMU-UI vary considerably in size across the countries analysed.

This paper aims to evaluate the progressivity of different fuel subsidies in Ecuador as well as the budgetary and distributional effects of a potential elimination of such subsidies. Our analysis makes use of ECUAMOD, the tax-benefit microsimulation model for Ecuador, together with representative household microdata from ENIGHUR 2011-12. Our results show that domestic gas subsidy tends to be progressive, whereas gasoline and diesel subsidies tend to be regressive. Our simulations show that eliminating all fuel subsidies would increase poverty and inequality due to the importance of domestic gas subsidy for low-income households. Eliminating only gasoline and diesel subsidies would not impact poverty and inequality, while allowing to reduce government expenditure. We further show that using part of the budget saved from the elimination of fuel subsidies to increase social assistance payments in Ecuador, could be a mechanism to compensate low-income families for their loss following fuel subsidy elimination.

With disparities in national unemployment rates reaching record levels, the debate on fiscal stabilisers in Europe has gained new momentum. Can a European unemployment insurance scheme help to absorb asymmetric shocks and bring about the desired level of macroeconomic stabilisation? What should such an unemployment benefit system look like? The contributions to this Forum explore the benefits expected from a European unemployment insurance scheme and discuss the difficulties in establishing such a policy.

Background: We developed an integrated model called Microsimulation for Income and Child Health (MICH) that provides a tool for analysing the prospective effects of fiscal policies on childhood health in European countries. The aim of this first MICH study is to evaluate the impact of alternative fiscal policies on childhood overweight and obesity in Italy. Methods: MICH model is composed of three integrated modules. Firstly, module 1 (M1) simulates the effects of fiscal policies on disposable household income using the tax-benefit microsimulation program EUROMOD fed with the Italian EU-SILC 2010 data. Secondly, module 2 (M2) exploits data provided by the Italian birth cohort called Nascita e Infanzia: gli Effetti dell'Ambiente (NINFEA), translated as Birth and Childhood: the Effects of the Environment study, and runs a series of concatenated regressions in order to estimate the prospective effects of income on child body mass index (BMI) at different ages. Finally, module 3 (M3) uses dynamic microsimulation techniques that combine the population structure and incomes obtained by M1, with regression model specifications and estimated effect sizes provided by M2, projecting BMI distributions according to the simulated policy scenarios. Results: Both universal benefits, such as universal basic income (BI), and targeted interventions, such as child benefit (CB) for poorer households, have a significant effect on childhood overweight, with a prevalence ratio (PR) in 10-year-old children - in comparison with the baseline fiscal system - of 0.88 (95%CI 0.82-0.93) and 0.89 (95%CI 0.83-0.94), respectively. The impact of the fiscal reforms was even larger for child obesity, reaching a PR of 0.67 (95%CI 0·50-0.83) for the simulated BI and 0.64 (95%CI 0.44-0.84) for CB at the same age. While both types of policies show similar effects, the estimated costs for a 1% prevalence reduction in overweight and obesity with respect to the baseline scenario is much lower with a more focalised benefit policy than with universal ones. Conclusions: Our results show that fiscal policies can have a strong impact on childhood health conditions. Focalised interventions that increase family income, especially in the most vulnerable populations, can help to prevent child overweight and obesity. Robust microsimulation models to forecast the effects of fiscal policies on health should be considered as one of the instruments to reach the Health in All Policies (HiAP) goals.

This paper presents baseline results from the latest version of EUROMOD (version I3.0+), the tax-benefit microsimulation model for the EU. First, we briefly report the process of updating EUROMOD. We then present indicators for income inequality and risk of poverty using EUROMOD and discuss the main reasons for differences between these and EU-SILC based indicators. We further compare EUROMOD distributional indicators across all EU 28 countries and over time between 2017 and 2020. Finally, we provide estimates of marginal effective tax rates (METR) for all 28 EU countries in order to explore the effect of tax and benefit systems on work incentives at the intensive margin. Throughout the paper, we highlight both the potential of EUROMOD as a tool for policy analysis and the caveats that should be borne in mind when using it and interpreting results. This paper updates the work reported in Kneeshaw (2020).

This paper presents baseline results from the latest version of EUROMOD (version I2.0+), the tax-benefit microsimulation model for the EU. First, we briefly report the process of updating EUROMOD. We then present indicators for income inequality and risk of poverty using EUROMOD and discuss the main reasons for differences between these and EU-SILC based indicators. We further compare EUROMOD distributional indicators across all EU 28 countries and over time between 2016 and 2019. Finally, we provide estimates of marginal effective tax rates (METR) for all 28 EU countries in order to explore the effect of tax and benefit systems on work incentives at the intensive margin. Throughout the paper, we highlight both the potential of EUROMOD as a tool for policy analysis and the caveats that should be borne in mind when using it and interpreting results. This paper updates the work reported in Tammik (2019).