We introduce a model of redistributive income taxation and public expenditure. Thisjoint treatment permits analyzing the interdependencies between the two policies: onecannot be chosen independently of the other. Empirical evidence reveals that partisanconfrontation essentially falls on...

Government support of private (occupational and personal) pensionsthrough the system of tax reliefs is large: between one quarter and onethird that of direct support of state pensions through public expenditure.However, it is regressive, lacks transparency and is difficult to control. Thispaper...

It is increasingly recognised that improving the quality and quantity of children’s services isan essential part of any long-term strategy to tackle poverty and social exclusion amongchildren. As part of its wider programme to address child poverty in England, Save TheChildren commissioned...

This paper represents the results of a small-scale qualitative study, exploringpublic perceptions of the redistributive effects of taxation and public spendingin the UK. Redistribution is not at the top of people’s minds when they considerthese issues and it is a complex subject on which they...

Acemoglu, Johnson, & Robinson (2002) have claimed that the world incomedistribution underwent a "Reversal of Fortune" from 1500 to the present, wherebyformerly rich countries in what is now the developing world became poor whilepoor ones grew rich. We question their analysis with regard to both...

Specific functional forms are often used in economic models of distributions;goodness-of-fit measures are used to assess whether a functional form is appropriatein the light of real-world data. Standard approaches use a distance criterion based onthe EDF, an aggregation of differences in...

This article is a comparative analysis of the sources of income inequalityin four countries, namely Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and the UnitedKingdom. It relies upon decompositions of inequality measures bypopulation groups and income sources (except for Japan because of datalimitations)....

We examine the performance of measures of mobility when allowance ismade for the possibility of data contamination. We find that “singlestage”indices – those that are applied directly to a sample from amultivariate income distribution – usually prove to be non-robust in theface of...

It is worth distinguishing social exclusion from social isolation, definingsocial isolation as the phenomenon of non-participation (of anindividual or group) in a society’s mainstream institutions, whilereserving ‘social exclusion’ for the subset of cases in which socialisolation occurs...

This paper is an overview of the social welfare systems of five EastAsian countries, namely Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong andSingapore. It analyses the overall costs of welfare as well as incomedistribution aspects, based on both aggregate data and a programme-byprogrammereview of their...