Using individual tax returns data, this paper explores the redistributive effect of Ecuador's personal income tax (PIT) from 2007 to 2011. We follow common practice in the context of tax incidence analysis and we compute different indexes of progressivity and redistributive impact of income...

This article analyzes Latin American and Caribbean income inequality, making three important contributions. First, we show that politics not only shapes redistribution, but also affects inequality produced by the market, with much of the effect occurring through the market conditioning...

Conflicts of interest over the generosity and structure of redistribution and social insurance (jointly: social policy) include that between the relatively poor and wealthy - which yields the familiar result that median-voter demand for broad redistribution increases in the income skew - and...

This paper assesses the impact on household incomes of the COVID-19 pandemic and governments' policy responses in April 2020 in four large and severely hit European countries: Belgium, Italy, Spain and the UK. We provide comparative evidence on the level of relative and absolute welfare...

This study evaluates which type of benefit-a universal benefit, a proxy mean-tested benefit, or a categorical benefit- better cushions the poverty effects of income shocks in a developing economy. We compare the effectiveness of the three benefit schemes on poverty first conceptually and then by...

Using the 2004 income survey of the Hungarian Central Statistical Office we consider the targeting of two types of unemployment-related benefits: a) unemployment insurance and re-training benefits and b) the unemloyment assistance (UA). The evidence suggests that unemployment-related benefits...

This paper presents findings on the changing effectiveness of cash transfers and income taxes on inequality and poverty reduction in four EU countries - the UK, Italy, Sweden and France. We use long time series (spanning four decades) to examine trends within countries over time and between...

The purpose of this paper is to propose theoretical foundations on the impact of transfer scheme, e.g. Community Agricultural Policy, on income inequality within European Countries. First, we show that ex-post inequality (in the after-transfer distribution) may increase if either initial...

This paper examines the distributional impacts of the changes to benefits, tax credits, pensions and direct taxes between the UK Elections in May 2010 and in May 2015. It also looks ahead to the longer-term effects of changes and plans that were announced by the 2010-2015 Coalition government,...

It is not straightforward to define the ethics of responsibility in cases where the consequences of changes in factors within our control are partly determined by factors beyond our control. In this paper, we suggest that one plausible view is to keep us responsible for the parts of the...