Recent debates of basic income (BI) proposals shine a useful spotlight on the challenges that traditional forms of income support are increasingly facing, and highlight gaps in social provisions that largely depend on income or employment status. A universal "no questions asked" public transfer...

This paper examines the fiscal and distributional effects of a number of alternative basic income implementation modes across 28 European welfare states. The paper aims to make three contributions to the literature. Firstly, through the use of EUROMOD's advanced 'add-on' and 'loop' features, we...

This paper quantifies the economic well-being of different age groups and the extent of their reliance on incomes from public and private sources. The aim is to establish how social benefits, and the taxes needed to finance them, affect income levels and disparities across different age groups....

The systems of direct taxes and cash benefits in the Member States of the European Union vary considerably in size and structure. We explore their direct impacts on cross-sectional income inequality (termed “redistributive effect” for the purpose of this paper) using EUROMOD, a tax-benefit...

We analyse the distributional effects of increased oil excises in Belgium by combining a Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) model with the EUROMOD microsimulation framework that exploits the rich detail of household-level data. The link between the CGE model and the micro level is top-down,...

Due to limited access to foreign savings after the 2008 crisis, transition economies are forced to rely more on domestic savings in financing their growth. In that respect, it is often argued that the government should use tax policy to encourage domestic savings. Since the personal income tax...

European countries have the world's most redistributive tax and transfer systems. While they have been well equipped to deal with vertical inequality - that is, fostering redistribution from the rich to the poor - less is known about their performance in dealing with horizontal inequality, that...

Traditional analyses of redistributive effects of the tax-benefit system are rooted in the concepts of relative income inequality and proportionality. This observation also applies to decompositions proposed by Kakwani (1977, 1984) and Lambert (1985) that reveal the vertical and horizontal...

Living standards in old age are affected both by the pension system and the tax system. Yet, little research analyses the interaction between both systems. In this paper, we connect the principles of the pension system (solidarity vs. insurance) to the principles of the tax system (vertical...

This paper embeds analysis of fiscal redistribution (FR) within the standard social welfare framework. Differences in FR are decomposed into differences in the magnitude (fiscal effort) and progressivity (fiscal progressivity) of transfers. Progressivity is further decomposed into differences in...