Tax and benefit systems in the enlarged EU vary significantly in size and structure. We examine how taxes and benefits shape income distributions in 19 EU countries, focusing on the differences between Western European countries (EU15) and Eastern European countries (Estonia, Hungary, Poland,...

The systems of direct taxes and cash benefits in the Member States of the European Union vary considerably in size and structure. We explore their direct impacts on cross-sectional income inequality (termed “redistributive effect” for the purpose of this paper) using EUROMOD, a tax-benefit...

This paper reports an exercise to validate EUROMOD output for 2001 by comparing income statistics calculated from the baseline micro-output with comparable statistics from the European Community Household Panel (ECHP). It focuses particularly on some of the income-based common “Laeken”...

Two weeks before the Euro was introduced into circulation as the common currency in twelve Member States (on 1 st January 2002) the European Union adopted a set of commonly agreed indicators for social inclusion. Among them are some income-based indicators, including poverty measures based on...

The aim of this paper is to evaluate whether policy reforms in Austria between 1998 and 2005 were successful in meeting redistributive objectives and in reducing poverty. For the analysis we use the tax/benefit micro-simulation model EUROMOD. Due to the sequence of reforms and the use of two...