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...

In the light of increasing inequality in contemporary society and a crisis of confidence in the neoliberal policies that have principally informed Western governance in the past 30 years, this article proposes and considers a communitarian approach to taxation. First, broad concepts of community...

According to a widely held popular belief, a pure increase in tax progression decreases work effort, increases wages and is thus bad for employment under competitive labour markets. This paper studies the effects of labour taxes in a general equilibrium model of two countries with monopoly...

The traditional definition of tax progressivity is being rewritten and this change could have serious ramifications for democratic decision-making. Up to now, tax progressivity has meant that, as an individual or household earned more income, they not only paid more in taxes but also paid a...

In this paper we use a panel of 189 countries to describe the salient trends that have emerged in national personal income tax systems spanning the twenty five year period from 1981 to 2005. Using complete national income tax schedules, we calculate actual average and marginal tax rates at...