Empirical findings on the relationship between income inequality and redistribution from a cross-country perspective are not conclusive. One reason may be that observers have in mind different concepts of redistribution. A major factor is that comparator countries' pre-fisc distributions...

Empirical findings on the relationship between income inequality and redistribution from a cross-country perspective are not conclusive. One reason may be that observers have in mind different concepts of redistribution. A major factor is that comparator countries’ pre-fisc distributions...

There is confusion in the literature concerning the relationship between income inequality and redistribution in a cross-country perspective. The reason for this is that different contributions in the literature are not referring to the same characteristic. This is shown by addressing...

Which country is most redistributive? This question is often discussed in terms of comparisons of measures of redistribution when each country's tax schedule is applied to its pre-tax income distribution. However, we believe that what most authors have in mind when referring to the "most...

The proposal involves the establishment of 'welfare accounts' for every person in a country. There are to be four accounts: a retirement account (covering pensions), an unemployment account (covering unemployment support), a human capital account (covering education and training), and a health...

This chapter reviews the theory of the voluntary public and private redistribution of wealth elaborated by economic analysis in the last forty years or so. The central object of the theory is altruistic gift-giving, construed as benevolent voluntary redistribution of income or wealth. The theory...

The authors analyze to what extent and how the tax burden should be shifted towards top income earners in order to reduce income inequality. Starting from Lambert and Aronson (Inequality decomposition analysis and the Gini coefficient revisited 1993) and Alvaredo (A note on the relationship...

The authors analyze to what extent and how the tax burden should be shifted towards top income earners in order to reduce income inequality. Starting from Lambert and Aronson (Inequality decomposition analysis and the Gini coefficient revisited 1993) and Alvaredo (A note on the relationship...

South Africa is one of the most unequal economies globally. In this paper, we examine the design of its personal income tax (PIT), with a focus on its redistributive function. We apply the Pfähler decomposition method to analyse the redistributive effects of key components of the South African...

Traditional analyses of redistributive effects of the tax-benefit system are rooted in the concepts of relative income inequality and proportionality. This observation also applies to decompositions proposed by Kakwani (1977, 1984) and Lambert (1985) that reveal the vertical and horizontal...