Much of the literature on flat tax reforms has highlighted the benefits of introducing flat personal income tax systems in transition economies. The advocated benefits of flat tax systems range from their simplicity, higher compliance and lower distortionary effects on growth and employment....

The 2010 Economic Adjustment Programme initiated a period of strict international supervision with respect to tax policy in Greece. The country implemented a large-scale fiscal consolidation package, aiming to reduce its public deficit below 3% of GDP by 2016. Since the beginning of the crisis,...

New Zealand generally performs well in terms of economic and social inclusion. It has high employment rates, and education and health-care systems work well for most. However, some New Zealanders are stuck on low incomes and face material deprivation and multiple barriers to economic and social...

Income inequality in Colombia has declined since the early 2000s but remains very high by international standards. Income dispersion largely originates from the labour market, which is characterised by a still high unemployment rate, a pervasive informal sector and a wide wage dispersion...

Notwithstanding impressive progress, poverty and inequality remain high in Chile in OECD comparison, and the tax-benefit system does little to improve on this. The government plans to introduce a new cash transfer for the poor, the Ingreso Ético Familiar. This is a welcome initiative. However,...

This paper provides an assessment of how households’ income has fared compared with GDP. While the prime focus is on incomes around the median, attention is paid also to the bottom of the income distribution. Thus, one contribution of the paper is to deliver a fresh assessment of the evolution...

The paper is a survey of literature and statistical sources on poverty and inequality in Russia in the 1990s and the 2000s. It serves as a background to OECD (2011), the OECD Labour Market and Social Policy Review of the Russian Federation that was released in 2011. We start with an overview of...

This paper analyses the first-round effects of hypothetical minimum wage increases on social outcomes in 21 EU countries with a statutory national minimum wage based on a microsimulation approach using EUROMOD. The methodological challenges related to the use of available EU household survey...

Structural trends not directly related to labour market functioning and redistribution have made a sizeable contribution to inequality and poverty in Sweden, but occupy only limited space in the income inequality debate. To fill this gap, we put a quarter of a century of rising inequality in...

This paper analyzes the impact of the COVID-19 crisis on household income in Austria, using detailed administrative labor market data, in combination with micro-simulation techniques, that enable specific labor market transitions to be modeled. We find that discretionary fiscal policy measures...