Personal Income Tax Reform and Revenue Potential in Transition

The paper uses the 1992 household survey for Bulgaria to show poor revenue performance of the income tax structure prevailing in 1992, which did not take into account the underlying distribution of income. The paper shows that Bulgaria can benefit from a much lower and simpler income tax rate structure, which will be superior on revenue and distributional grounds. Subsequently in the 1990s, Bulgaria implemented an income tax reform similar to the one advocated in this paper.