Income Inequality And Fiscal Policy 2nd Edition

This note will describe recent trends in income inequality in both advanced and developing economies and how tax and expenditure policies have impacted on these trends. It will discuss how tax and expenditure policies should be designed to bring about a more equitable distribution of income, as well as to protect the most vulnerable populations during periods of fiscal consolidation.

This paper is an excerpt from Inequality and Fiscal Policy. The sizeable increase in income inequality experienced in advanced economies and many parts of the world since the 1990s and the severe consequences of the global economic and financial crisis have brought issues on equity and distribution to the top of the policy agenda. The book delves into this discussion by analyzing fiscal policy and its link with inequality. Fiscal policy is the government’s most powerful tool for addressing inequality. It affects household consumption directly and indirectly. An important message of the book is that growth and equity are not necessarily at odds; with the appropriate mix of policy instruments and careful policy design, countries can in many cases achieve better distributional outcomes and improve economic efficiency. Country case studies demonstrate the diversity of challenges and the diverging ways to use fiscal policy for redistribution. The analysis presented in the book builds on work by IMF economists and leading academics.

The sizeable increase in income inequality experienced in advanced economies and many parts of the world since the 1990s and the severe consequences of the global economic and financial crisis have brought distributional issues to the top of the policy agenda. The challenge for many governments is to address concerns over rising inequality while simultaneously promoting economic efficiency and more robust economic growth. The book delves into this discussion by analyzing fiscal policy and its link with inequality. Fiscal policy is the government’s most powerful tool for addressing inequality. It affects households ‘consumption directly (through taxes and transfers) and indirectly (via incentives for work and production and the provision of public goods and individual services such as education and health). An important message of the book is that growth and equity are not necessarily at odds; with the appropriate mix of policy instruments and careful policy design, countries can in many cases achieve better distributional outcomes and improve economic efficiency. Country studies (on the Netherlands, China, India, Republic of Congo, and Brazil) demonstrate the diversity of challenges across countries and their differing capacity to use fiscal policy for redistribution. The analysis presented in the book builds on and extends work done at the IMF, and also includes contributions from leading academics.

Top economists provide much-needed guidance--and some surprising conclusions--in response to rising public concerns about inequality in the U.S. tax system.

Growing regional inequality within countries has raised the perception that “some places and people” are left behind. This has prompted a shift toward inward-looking policies and away from pro-growth reforms. This paper presents novel stylized facts on regional inequality for OECD countries. It shows that regional disparity in per-capita GDP is large (even after adjusting for regional price differences), persistent, and widening over time. The paper also finds that rising nationwide income inequality is associated with both rising within-region income inequality and widening average income across regions. The rise in inequality is related to declining incentives for interregional labor mobility, especially for poor households in lagging regions, which are estimated to reduce by as much as one-third in the United States. Against these facts, the paper proposes a framework to identify whether, how and by whom fiscal policies can be used to tackle regional inequality. It outlines conditions under which those policies should be spatially-targeted and illustrates how they can be complementary to conventional means-testing methods in mitigating income inequality.

Stuck in the Middle examines both economic and social public policy initiatives in its assertion that enhancing the welfare of people in developed and developing nations requires an explicit focus on the middle class. Contents Foreword 1. Overview: Fiscal Policy, Distribution, and the Middle Class 2. Stylized Facts on the Middle Class and the Development Process 3. The Future of Global Income Inequality 4. The Scope and Limits of Subsidies 5. Policies for Lower Global Wealth Inequality 6. Can Happiness Research Help Fiscal Policy? 7. The Politics of Effective and Sustainable Redistribution

This book aims to empirically and theoretically study how income inequality and demographic change affected fiscal policy and subsequent economic growth globally in the past decades from four perspectives. First, it briefly reviews the dynamic changes of income sources that contribute to inequality. Second, it distinguishes between income inequality induced by differences in labor productivity and income inequality induced by differences in capital income. Third, it briefly reviews the dynamic changes of tax composition in the age of demographic change. Last, it discusses the impacts of changes in age structure on the extent of taxes on income relative to expenditure. This book offers a comprehensive discussion to understand and analyze the reason, performance and challenge of fiscal policy and economic growth from the perspective of inequality and demographics. In addition to students, teachers and researchers in the areas of equity, demography, political economy and economic policy, this book is also of great interest to policy makers, planners and non-government agencies who are concerned with understanding and addressing poverty-related and aging-related issues in developed and developing countries.

Edited by Nora Lustig, the Commitment to Equity Handbook: Estimating the Impact of Fiscal Policy on Inequality and Poverty (Brookings Institution Press and CEQ Institute-Tulane University, 2nd edition, 2022) is a unique manual on the theory and practical methods to estimate the impact of taxation and public spending on inequality and poverty. In addition, the second edition covers frontier topics such as alternative approaches to measure the redistributive effect of education, health, and infrastructure spending. Policymakers, social planners, and economists are provided with a step-by-step guide to applying fiscal incidence analysis, illustrated by country studies. The 2nd edition of the Handbook has two volumes. Volume 1 is comprised of Part I, Methodology, describes what a CEQ Assessment© is and presents the theoretical underpinnings of fiscal incidence analysis and the indicators used to assess the distributive impact and effectiveness of fiscal policy. Part II, Implementation, presents the methodology on how taxes, subsidies, and social spending should be allocated. It includes a step-by step guide to completing the CEQ Master Workbook©, a multi-sheet Excel file that houses detailed information on the country’s fiscal system and the results used as inputs for policy discussions, academic papers, and policy reports. Part III, “Applications,” presents applications of the CEQ framework to low- and middle-income countries and includes simulations of policy reforms. In this 2nd edition, chapters 1, 6, and 8 have been significantly updated and two new country studies have been added to Part III. Parts IV (updated), V (new), and VI (new) are available online only. Part IV contains the CEQ Assessment’s main tools. Part V includes the databases housed in the CEQ Data Center on Fiscal Redistribution. Part VI contains the CEQ Institute’s microsimulation tools. Volume 2 (new) includes a collection of chapters whose purpose is to expand the knowledge and methodological frontiers to sharpen even further the analysis of fiscal policy’s redistributive impact. Topics include: alternative approaches to value in-kind education and health services; alternative methods to evaluate spending on infrastructure; corporate taxes and taxation on capital incomes; inter-temporal fiscal incidence and the redistributive consequences of social insurance pensions; fiscal redistribution, macroeconomic stability and growth; and, the political economy of fiscal redistribution.