On the Relative Equitability of a Family of Taxation Rules

A taxation problem consists of collecting a given amount of taxes out of a population whose gross income vector is given. A tax rule R is more equitable than a rule R′ when the after-tax income vector generated by R Lorenz dominates that generated by R′. In this paper, we present a one-parameter family of tax rules whose members are fully ranked in terms of relative equitability, for any (finite) income distribution. Copyright 2006 Blackwell Publishing Inc..