Using recent expenditure survey data, this paper investigates the incidence of all indirect taxes in Brazil. It applies a novel approach to estimate the effective tax rate by computing the specific cumulative taxes levied on thousands of items available in the data set. The findings show that...

Using recent expenditure survey data, this paper investigates the incidence of all indirect taxes in Brazil. It applies a novel approach to estimate the effective tax rate by computing the specific cumulative taxes levied on thousands of items available in the data set. The findings show that...

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...

This paper evaluates the distributional and welfare effects of two recent changes of Value Added Tax (VAT) and excise taxes in Italy applying and comparing two related and complementary methods of analysis: the first based on the distributional characteristics of Feldstein (1972) and recently...

On the basis of anonymous (or cross-sectional) analyses, income losses during the Great Recession in a number of European countries were concentrated among the poorest ten per cent of the population. The anonymous approach however, which simply compares the distribution of income at two points...

This paper is a review and commentary, from both ethical and informational perspectives, of some known results in optimal anti-poverty budgetary rules for two kinds of intervention, direct income transfers and wage employment programmes.