Quantitative indicators of the tax burden used in political discussions, quite often do not prove very reliable for two reasons; either they are rather crude summary measures or they are rather selectivly chosen benchmark tax load figures. A natural way to improve the situation is to introduce...

The paper first considers two properties of measures of effective progression, proportional yield neutrality and linear decomposability. It is shown that decomposability implies yield neutrality but not the converse. The concept of sensitivity of a measure to progression in various ranges of the...