One of the biggest political issues in Japan is an increase in the rate of value added tax (VAT). In this paper, we evaluate its impact on household expenditure, using Japans April 1997 VAT rate increase from three to five percent as a case study. A rate increase induces price hikes, and...

Consumption taxes are often considered as the most anti-redistributive component of the tax system. Yet, very few estimates, and fewer international comparisons of the redistributive impact of consumption taxes exist in the literature, due to scarce data on household expenditures. We use...

The analysis of the distributional impact of fiscal policy proposals often requires information on household expenditures and incomes. It is unusual to have one data source with information on both and this problem is generally overcome with statistical matching of independent data sources. In...