This paper aims at clarifying the notion "overall distributive effect" of an income component or a policy proposal and moreover discusses various approaches for assessing the distributional impact of the components of total income. We pay particular attention to the problem of evaluating the...

This paper presents evidence on household savings in urban regions of the Chinese provinces Sichuan and Liaoning based on data from the State Statistical Bureau's Urban Household Survey for the late 1980s. In this period the Chinese economy was subject to extensive reforms that resulted in rapid...

The purpose of this paper is to define various mean-spread-preserving transformations, which can be considered as generalized versions of the mean-Gini-preserving transformation. The mean-Gini-preserving transformation, which was introduced independently by Zoli (1997, 2002) and Aaberge (2000b),...

The purpose of this paper is to present an exercise where we identify optimal income tax rules under the constraint of fixed tax revenue. To this end, we estimate a microeconomic model with 78 parameters that capture heterogeneity in consumption-leisure preferences for singles and couples as...

This paper treats local governments as utility maximizing agents when they allocate resources among different service sectors. We present estimates for eight service sectors, based on a modified version of the extended linear expenditure system (ELES) and using observations at the municipal...

The standard practice in most OECD countries is to measure and evaluate poverty on the basis of a poverty line defined as a specific proportion of the median equivalent income within a country. However, this approach disregards regional differences in prices and needs within a country and may,...

Most studies on the economic consequences of ageing rely on Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) models that account for feedback mechanisms through changes in relative prices, tax bases etc. However, since individual labour supply behaviour is considered to be a key element in CGE-analyses of...

Despite a broad consensus on the need to account for the value of public services and geographical cost of living differences on the measurement of poverty, there is little reliable evidence on how these factors actually affect poverty estimates. Unlike the standard approach in studies of the...

We analyse how inequality of disposable income evolved in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden during the late 1980s and early 1990s when unemployment rose dramatically in all four countries. We find that a standard measure of inequality - the Gini coefficient - was surprisingly stable in all...

Fiscal disparities arise from differences in costs and capacity to produce a standard package of public services. This paper proposes to use a structural modelling approach as basis for measuring fiscal disparities across municipalities. This approach differs from the widely used reduced-form...