The adverse distributional effects of a flat tax are well known and have been documented by empirical research in several countries, including Belgium. Advocates of the flat tax argue, correctly, that many of these studies do not take into account agents' behavioural reactions and possible feed...

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...

Given the increased availability of survey income data, in this paper we analyse the pros and cons of alternative data sets for static tax-benefit microsimulation in Italy. We focus on all possible alternatives, namely using (a) SHIW or (b) IT-SILC data using a consistent net-to-gross...

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...

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,...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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,...