Policy discussions on pension systems generally focus on their sustainability and design, including retirement age, income reference and contributory period, with relatively little attention devoted to the tax treatment of pension contributions and pension benefits. However, tax expenditures -...

Due to the worsening of economic crisis across European countries, the problem of poverty and the ways to tackle it returned at the centre of political and scientific debate. The level of poverty increased after the crisis, especially in Mediterranean countries such as Italy, Spain and Greece....

This paper examines the main measures as announced in the 2016 Budget for Malta and their redistributive impact. The measures considered include the minimum pension measure, the in-work benefit and the income tax measure. EUROMOD, a tax-benefit micro-simulation model was used to simulate these...

It is widely recognized that childcare has important pedagogical, economic and social effects on both children and parents. This paper is the first attempt to estimate a joint structural model of female labour supply and childcare behaviour applied to Italy in order to analyse the effects of...

This paper aims to explore how housing allowances and mortgage interest tax relief have evolved in recent years, against the background of falling disposable incomes and rising housing costs. The analysis focuses on seven EU countries (Greece, Italy, Austria, Hungary, the Netherlands, Sweden and...

Minimum income schemes are set to provide citizens with a minimum living standard. In Spain, these schemes consist of a heterogeneous and complex collection of regional benefits designed and implemented by the Autonomous Communities. This generates important regional discrepancies among the...

Financial incentives affect the labour supply decisions of households, but typically the impact of such incentives varies significantly across household types. While there is a substantial literature on the labour supply effects of tax reforms and in-work benefits, the impact of changes in...

The purpose of this paper is to explore and compare the effectiveness of Minimum Income (MI) schemes in protecting people of working age from poverty in the European Union. Using the EU-wide microsimulation model EUROMOD, we investigate (a) coverage and (b) adequacy of MI schemes in 18...

We compare the distributional effects of policy changes introduced in the period 2008-2013 in twelve EU countries using the EU microsimulation model EUROMOD. The countries, Germany, Estonia, Ireland, Greece, Spain, France, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Portugal, Romania and the UK, chose different...

Very low work intensity and at-risk-of-poverty are two of the three indicators used for monitoring progress towards the Europe 2020 poverty and social exclusion reduction target. Their timeliness is critical for tracing the effectiveness of policy interventions towards reaching this target....