Atkinson's book Inequality: What Can Be Done? (Harvard University Press, 2015) sets out a range of concrete proposals aimed at reducing income inequality, which cover a very broad span but include major changes to the income tax and social transfers system and the minimum wage. These are framed...

Existing tax schedules are often overly complex and characterized by discontinuities in the marginal tax burden. In this paper we propose a class of progressive smooth functions to replace personal income tax schedules. These functions depend only on three meaningful parameters, and avoid the...

The Australian income tax and transfer system has undergone considerable reform since the mid 1980s. As a number of commentators have pointed out, one impact of reforms to cash transfers for families, as well as of some reforms to direct taxes, has been the evolution of a defacto system of...

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...

This paper uses the tax-benefit microsimulation model EUROMOD to assess how three types of tax reform would affect the state budget and the income distribution in the Netherlands. After briefly introducing the Dutch tax system and the case for and against these reforms, we investigate the...

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,...

This paper analyses the impact of the implementation of a child tax credit in Austria in 2019, both on micro and macro level. First, we assess the fiscal and distributional impact of this reform using EUROMOD. Second, we estimate labour supply impacts of the reform based on a structural discrete...

Belgium has seen major changes in its tax-benefit system over the past twenty years. These changes have, to a large extent, co-determined the evolution of disposable incomes of Belgian households on one hand, and their incentives to work on the other. In this paper we assess equity and...

This paper focuses on the study of the effects on social welfare generated by the scheme of joint taxation of the Spanish Personal Income Tax (PIT), whose peculiarity linked to its condition of optionality, allows the minimization of households´ tax bill. Different scenarios are simulated using...

This paper aims to propose a social protection system that "decommodifies" labour and fulfills the properties of a Social Protection Floor satisfying revenue-neutrality. To this end, firstly, a Universal Basic Income (UBI) scheme is explored. Secondly, the UBI is transformed into a Negative...