This paper shows that a Value Added Tax (Vat) with multiple tax rates in Italy is not the most effective way to pursue redistributive aims. As the tax revenue of the Italian Vat is significantly affected by the use of reduced tax rates and exemptions, we suggest that a shift to a uniform Vat...

This paper addresses the issues of whether and how the degree of economic integration may affect central government tax revenues and the intensity of decentralisation. To this purpose, we empirically test the direct impact of economic integration on central tax revenues using the concept of...

This paper assesses the relative merits of tax credits for dependent children and child benefits in redistributing income and alleviating poverty in Italy. The main result is that the great emphasis put by Italian policy-makers in designing tax credits in the last 15 years has been mostly...

The aim of this paper is to investigate the impact of economic openness on the vertical structure of the public sector within a country. To tackle this issue we set up a simple theoretical model of fiscal federalism, where both central and local public spending enter the objective functions of...

The effects of personal income tax changes are usually analyzed by comparing the inequality of income distributions before and after the tax policy change on a fixed pretax income distribution. This constant-population methodology aims at isolating the "pure" redistributive effect of the tax...

This paper analyses the effects of the personal income tax (PIT) changes implemented in Italy in the period 1995-2005 on redistribution and efficiency. on the redistributive side, using Lorenz dominance techniques and their correspondence with welfare prescriptions, the paper shows that many...

What does poverty mean? Who is poor? And how to measure poverty? Notwithstanding its intuitive nature, the analysis of poverty is fraught with difficulties and disagreement with regard to both its definition and its measurement. To this purpose, this paper proposes a wide review of the debate...