The redistributive effect of the Portuguese welfare state through pensions, benefits and income taxes is investigated in detail over the 2006- 2010 period using disposable income as benchmark. All social and fiscal policy instruments analysed contribute significantly to the reduction in...

We use a range of data sources to assess if, and to what extent, government redistribution policies have slowed or accelerated the trend towards greater income disparities in the past 20-25 years. In most countries, inequality among “non-elderly” households has widened during most phases of...

The redistributive effect of the Portuguese welfare state through pensions, benefits and taxes is investigated in detail over the 2006-10 period using disposable income as benchmark. All social and fiscal policy instruments analysed contribute significantly to the reduction in inequality and...

The adverse distributional effects of a flat tax are well known and have been documented by empirical research in several countries, including Belgium. Advocates of the flat tax argue, correctly, that these studies do not take into account agents’ behavioural reactions and possible feed back...

For a number of reasons, incomes vary strongly with age. The nature of this variation is of interest for a wide range of policy purposes. Since age structures differ across countries, knowledge about the incomes earned by different age groups is also necessary for understanding and interpreting...

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...

Macro-based summary indicators of effective tax burdens cannot provide information on the level or distribution of the marginal effective tax rates thought to influence household behaviour. They also do not capture differences in effective tax rates facing different subgroups of the population....

This paper quantifies the economic well-being of different age groups and the extent of their reliance on incomes from public and private sources. The aim is to establish how social benefits, and the taxes needed to finance them, affect income levels and disparities across different age groups....

Consumption taxes are traditional source of public revenue in the Czech Republic and have been the second largest source of leakage of households' finance in the last decade following the social security contributions. However there is a lack of the precise redistributional analyses of the...

This paper studies the impact of changes in the external balance of Pakistan. We explain why the economic growth achieved during the past decade was highly dependent on improvements in the external balance. Between 2001 and 2007, Pakistan benefited from an increase in remittances, foreign...