The 2010 Economic Adjustment Programme initiated a period of strict international supervision with respect to tax policy in Greece. The country implemented a large-scale fiscal consolidation package, aiming to reduce its public deficit below 3% of GDP by 2016. Since the beginning of the crisis,...

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...

This paper presents baseline results from the latest version of EUROMOD (version G2.1), the tax-benefit microsimulation model for the EU. First, we briefly report the process of updating EUROMOD. We then present indicators for income inequality and risk of poverty using EUROMOD and discuss the...

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....

The at-risk-of-poverty rate is one of the three indicators used for monitoring progress towards the Europe 2020 poverty and social exclusion reduction target. Timeliness of this indicator is critical for monitoring the effectiveness of policies. However, due in part to the complicated nature of...

We compare the distributional effects of policy changes presented as fiscal consolidation measures in nine EU countries that experienced large budget deficits following the financial crisis of the late 2000s and subsequent economic downturn, using the EU microsimulation model EUROMOD. The nine...

The severe economic crisis affecting Greece since 2009 is having an unprecedented impact in terms of job and income losses, and is widely perceived to have a comparably significant effect in terms of greater inequality and increased poverty. We provide an assessment of whether (and to what...

The current Greek crisis and the government's fiscal consolidation effort have elevated tax evasion to one of the most crucial policy issues in the domestic debate. The paper attempts to shed light on one aspect of the phenomenon, namely its distributional implications. We compare a large panel...

The at-risk-of-poverty rate is one of the three indicators used for monitoring progress towards the Europe 2020 poverty and social exclusion reduction target. Timeliness of this indicator is crucial for monitoring of the social situation and of the effectiveness of tax and benefit policies....

Policy over the past years has seen a gradual movement away from universal social benefits towards the provision of more targeted benefit schemes. Using the European tax-benefit microsimulation model EUROMOD, this paper aims to compare the effectiveness of income-tested benefits at different...