Much of the literature on flat tax reforms has highlighted the benefits of introducing flat personal income tax systems in transition economies. The advocated benefits of flat tax systems range from their simplicity, higher compliance and lower distortionary effects on growth and employment....

This papers quantifies the redistributive effects on progressivity, poverty and welfare, that would occur if the monetary benefits currently in place in the Spanish system were to be replaced by a neutral alternative in terms of spending, granting a universal basic income (UBI) to everyone. We...

The Great Recession and the widespread adoption of fiscal austerity policies have heightened concern about inequality and how well tax-benefit systems redistribute. We examine how the distribution of income in the EU countries which were hardest hit during the recession evolved over this time....

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,...

Little is known about the effectiveness of means-tested benefits in Bulgaria. Using individual and household level data, I analyse the performance of two social assistance and two means-tested child benefits. I find that the programmes reach a very small proportion of the households with incomes...

The "Minimum Vital Income" (IMV) constitutes a novelty in the panorama for fighting poverty by guaranteeing minimum incomes after the COVID-19 crisis. This work simulates the distributional and poverty effects of the IMV introduction across Spanish regions using EUROMOD. Our results show that...

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...

Over the past years, the number of university graduates increased at an unprecedented rate in Great Britain. We analyse how this higher education (HE) expansion affected inequality in household net incomes in the 2000s. We show that, all else being equal, education composition changes led to...

Western countries' income tax systems exempt the return from investing in owner-occupied housing. Returns from other investments are instead taxed, thus distorting households’ portfolio choices, although it is argued that housing property taxation might act as a counterbalance. Based on data...

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...