The role of indirect taxes in social policy is investigated by 1) comparing the distributional pattern of indirect taxes with the one of personal income taxes and social security contributions; 2) calculating the indirect tax liabilities for recipients of social benefits; 3) assessing the...

Belgium has seen major changes in its tax-benefit system over the past twenty years. These changes have, to a large extent, co-determined the evolution of disposable incomes of Belgian households on one hand, and their incentives to work on the other. In this paper we assess equity and...

Most of the available comparative empirical evidence on levels and trends in income inequalities and poverty in OECD countries relies on the concept of household disposable cash income, thus ignoring the services governments provide to households. Including those services matters a lot, however,...

Income aggregates and poverty and inequality measures tend to show important differences when calculated either with disposable income reported in SILC data, or with the same income concept calculated on the basis of the microsimulation model EUROMOD, which starts from gross incomes in SILC....

We are grateful to Maryse Fesseau and colleagues from the OECD Statistics Directorate for comments on this work and to Maxime Ladaique (OECD Social Policy Division) for guidance on OECD social expenditure data. We gratefully acknowledge the suggestions provided by members of the Working Party on...

There is a long-standing controversy in the academic literature over the question of whether targeting benefits towards the bottom part of the income distribution actually enhances or weakens their redistributive impact. Korpi and Palme have influentially claimed that “the more we target...

In the microsimulation literature, it is still uncommon to test the statistical significance of results. In this article we argue that this situation is both undesirable and unnecessary. Provided the parameters used in the microsimulation are exogenous, as is often the case in static...

Public support to families with pre-school children can be in the form of cash benefits (e.g. child allowances) or of “in-kind” support (e.g. care services such as kindergartens). The mix of these support measures varies greatly across OECD countries, from a cash / in-kind composition of...

Imputed rental income of homeowners is tax exempt in most countries, despite the long-standing arguments recommending its inclusion in the tax base, on both equity and efficiency grounds. While the financial and fiscal crisis revived interest towards this form of taxation, this paper...

Imputed rental income of homeowners is tax exempt in most countries, despite the long-standing arguments recommending its inclusion in the tax base, on both equity and efficiency grounds. The current fiscal crisis revived interest towards this form of taxation. The paper investigates the fiscal...