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...

The authors use the European Union-wide tax--benefit model, EUROMOD, to establish baseline rates of relative poverty in 1998 for each of the Member States and then explore their sensitivity to (a) an increase in unemployment, (b) real income growth and (c) an increase in earnings inequality....