Getting tax and transfer systems to efficiently deliver sufficient revenues to achieve macroeconomic targets, address goals in re-distribution and social welfare, encourage employment, accommodate business-competitiveness concerns and incorporate environmental issues is difficult. In Australia,...

Israel’s tax mix is reasonably growth- and employment-friendly. Nonetheless, tax reform is needed to foster an inclusive recovery from the COVID-19 crisis and help tackle Israel’s main economic and societal challenges of high poverty, including among those in work, and slow aggregate...

Immigrants make up one fifth of the Belgian working age population, but their labour market integration is poor. Employment rates of non-EU immigrants, in particular, are very low, and the problem extends to their native-born offspring. Further, with more precarious jobs and lower wages,...

The Chilean economy has had an extraordinary performance over the last decades with strong growth and declining poverty rates. However, the economy is now slowing at a time when inequality remains very high, making future social progress challenging. This paper discusses how to achieve greater...

While policymakers are rightly concerned about evidence of rising income concentration at the top, it is often wrongly assumed that the same rich individuals stay rich. In reality, the membership of this group are in a state of constant flux. This new study, based on more than 20 million tax...

This paper assesses Italy’s 2019 tax and benefit reforms, analyses hypothetical reforms and proposes a reform package that balances goals of reducing poverty, encouraging employment and fiscal sustainability. Using the OECD’s Tax-Benefit and the EUROMOD microsimulation models, it shows that...

The paper studies the impact of tax-benefit policies on the distribution of household incomes and work incentives in Estonia. It makes use of microsimulation modelling approach and applies the EU tax-benefit model EUROMOD to quantify the first-order effects of policy changes in 2016-2018 and of...

The personal tax system has a large influence on incentives to work, save and invest and hence growth. At the same time it is a key policy lever for income redistribution. This paper analyses how income distribution patterns changed in Spain before and after the crisis using the personal income...

This paper analyses income inequality in Ireland using a new panel dataset based on the administrative tax records of the Revenue Commissioners for Ireland. High inequality at market incomes in Ireland by international standards appears to be driven by both ends of the income distribution. An...

The economic literature suggests that a revenue-neutral shift of tax revenues from income taxes to property taxes would increase GDP per capita in the medium term. This paper analyses for Ireland the consequences of such a shift in the tax mix. In particular, it examines whether this can be...