Contemporary policy dialogues in Japan suggest that tax credits should replace income deductions in order to enhance the redistributive effect of personal income taxes. Several microsimulation studies have examined the effects of such proposals and have attempted to quantify their changes....

The distributional impacts of fiscal policies are instrumental in reducing inequality in countries like the Philippines, where inequality has been persistently high. This paper assesses how equitable various taxes and transfers in the Philippines are by deriving the elasticities of Atkinson and...

This paper explores the revenue-raising aspect of progressive taxation and derives, on the basis of a simple model, the optimal degree of tax progressivity where the tax revenue is used exclusively to finance (perfectly) targeted transfers to the poor. The paper shows that not only would it be...