Between 1988 and 1993 the Belgian personal income tax system and the indirect tax system have been reformed to a considerable extent. We use microsimulation models to investigate the impact of the reform on the liability progression and the redistributive effect of the combined tax system. The...

Administrative data on personal income taxes and household budget surveys differ in at least one important respect: the definition of the unit of observation. The sociological concept of a household does not coincide with the administrative definition of a fiscal unit. We investigate whether the...

In this paper we investigate the progressivity impact of various components of the Belgian personal income tax system, before and after a major reform of this system. The reform reduced the top tax rates, broadened the tax base and increased tax credits. We show that, contrary to the opinion,...

Administrative data on personal income taxes and household budget surveys differ in at least one important respect: the definition of the unit of observation. The sociological concept of a household does not coincide with the administrative definition of a fiscal unit. We investigate whether the...

In this paper we investigate the progressivity impact of various components of the Belgian personal income tax system, before and after a major reform of this system. The reform reduced the top tax rates, broadened the tax base and increased tax credits. We show that, contrary to the opinion,...

We analyse questionnaire data from a representative sample of the Flemish working population. For 781 respondents we construct their perception of the actual and of the fair income distribution. We check whether the use of different inequality measures leads to different interpretations of these...

We revisit the well-known decomposition of the Gini coefficient into betweengroups, within-groups and overlap terms in the context of two groups in which the incomes in one group may be scaled and that group’s population weight modified. In this more general setting than usual, we focus on the...

To take into account heterogeneity in a social welfare function, Ebert (1997) and Shorrocks (1995) show that the only consistent way of welfare measurement consists of either constructing an artificial distribution in which each household is weighted by the number of equivalent individuals, or...

This paper presents an ordered logit approach to model the optimal timing of buying a house during the life cycle. The model is applied to three recent Belgian household budget surveys. We find that households postpone homeownership or choose to be lifelong tenant due to an increase of the...

In this paper we investigate the evolution of the inequality in well-being across different countries between 1975 and 2000. We treat well-being as a multidimensional concept focusing on three important dimensions of life: standard of living, health and education. Inequality in the three...