This article analyzes Latin American and Caribbean income inequality, making three important contributions. First, we show that politics not only shapes redistribution, but also affects inequality produced by the market, with much of the effect occurring through the market conditioning...

Using individual tax returns data, this paper explores the redistributive effect of Ecuador's personal income tax (PIT) from 2007 to 2011. We follow common practice in the context of tax incidence analysis and we compute different indexes of progressivity and redistributive impact of income...

Conflicts of interest over the generosity and structure of redistribution and social insurance (jointly: social policy) include that between the relatively poor and wealthy - which yields the familiar result that median-voter demand for broad redistribution increases in the income skew - and...

Using the 2004 income survey of the Hungarian Central Statistical Office we consider the targeting of two types of unemployment-related benefits: a) unemployment insurance and re-training benefits and b) the unemloyment assistance (UA). The evidence suggests that unemployment-related benefits...

The Russian tax-benefit system consists of numerous types of support available to a large circle of beneficiaries; they are regulated by a number of legislative acts that focus on certain types of assistance rather than on vulnerable groups. In addition, the decentralization reform of social...

This paper uses the tax-benefit microsimulation model EUROMOD to assess how three types of tax reform would affect the state budget and the income distribution in the Netherlands. After briefly introducing the Dutch tax system and the case for and against these reforms, we investigate the...

The poverty reduction potential of national social assistance programs in eight Central and Eastern European countries is examined using data from the EU-SILC. Results indicate that social assistance programs are a marginal component of the social protection system throughout the region. They...

This paper presents findings on the changing effectiveness of cash transfers and income taxes on inequality and poverty reduction in four EU countries - the UK, Italy, Sweden and France. We use long time series (spanning four decades) to examine trends within countries over time and between...

This paper examines the distributional impacts of the changes to benefits, tax credits, pensions and direct taxes between the UK Elections in May 2010 and in May 2015. It also looks ahead to the longer-term effects of changes and plans that were announced by the 2010-2015 Coalition government,...

It is not straightforward to define the ethics of responsibility in cases where the consequences of changes in factors within our control are partly determined by factors beyond our control. In this paper, we suggest that one plausible view is to keep us responsible for the parts of the...