Conventional wisdom states that fiscal policy redistributes little in Latin America. Lower tax revenues and – above all – lower and less progressive transfers have been identified as the main cause. Existing studies show that, while in Europe the distribution of all transfers combined (cash...

This paper presents a tax-benefit incidence analysis for a large time period. The objective is to know if has been income redistribution across Mexican households during the last twenty years, since during this period the Mexican economy has suffered important structural changes and as well its...

This paper aims at analyzing the redistributive impact that the inclusion of imputed rental market value of owner-occupied housing would have when quantifying ability to pay, rather than the legal imputation that considers cadastral values. We consider the Spanish Personal Income Tax as...

In contrast to the experience in high-income OECD countries, the introduction of democracy in most low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) has been followed, as a rule, by a concentration of income. Using the median voter hypothesis as analytical tool, this paper explores the conditions under...

Taxes and transfers can have significant impacts on poverty and inequality. All standard measures are by definition anonymous in the sense that we do not know the identity of winners and losers. That a given combination of taxes and transfers makes some of the poor poorer, however, may be...