The Distributional Impact Of Taxes And Transfers

The World Bank has partnered with the Commitment to Equity Institute at Tulane University to implement their diagnostic tool—the Commitment to Equity (CEQ) Assessment—designed to assess how taxation and public expenditures affect income inequality, poverty, and different economic groups. The approach relies on comprehensive fiscal incidence analysis, which measures the contribution of each individual intervention to poverty and inequality reduction as well as the combined impact of taxes and social spending. The CEQ Assessment provide an evidence base upon which alternative reform options can be analyzed. The use of a common methodology makes the results comparable across countries. This volume presents eight country studies that examine the distributional effects of individual programs and policy measures—and the net effect of each country’s mix of policies and programs. These case studies were produced in the context of Bank policy dialogue and have since been used to propose alternative reform options.

The Economic Impacts of Tax—Transfer Policy: Regional and Distributional Effects deals with evaluating proposed income-transfer policies through tax modeling. The book analyzes the direct and indirect effects of two variants of a negative income tax plan. These are the standard negative income tax and the Family Assistance Plan. By studying the indirect effects of income-maintenance programs on industries, occupations, and different regions, the authors point to understanding the effectiveness of alternative income-maintenance programs. Proposed changes in national taxes and transfer policies aim to achieve income redistribution. In their studies and models, the authors noted that the full impact of these tax policies throughout the income spectra covering different income classes, industries, occupations, and regions is different from that gathered from observations involving the direct effects of these schemes. The authors cite some policy implications resulting from their study, such as the redistributional impacts of direct tax-transfer scheme are not as efficient as expected and that increasing the demand for low-skilled workers and improving their job qualities is one way of improving income distribution. The text is valuable for economists and government policymakers in the finance and labor sectors, as well as for sociologists and political economists.

This book focuses on the distributional consequences of the public sector and examines and documents, theoretically and empirically, the effects of government spending and taxation on personal distribution, and includes chapters investigating the relationship between the public sector and functional distribution of national income.

Fiscal policy is a key tool for achieving distributional objectives in advanced economies. This paper embeds the discussion of fiscal redistribution within the standard social welfare framework, which lends itself to a transparent and practical evaluation of the extent and determinants of fiscal redistribution. Differences in fiscal redistribution are decomposed into differences in the magnitude of transfers (fiscal effort) and in the progressivity of transfers (fiscal progressivity). Fiscal progressivity is further decomposed into differences in the distribution of transfers across income groups (targeting performance) and in the social welfare returns to targeting due to varying initial levels of income inequality (targeting returns). This decomposition provides a clear distinction between the concepts of progressivity and targeting, and clarifies the relationship between them. For illustrative purposes, the framework is applied to data for 28 EU countries to determine the factors explaining differences in their fiscal redistribution and to discuss patterns in fiscal redistribution highlighted in the literature.

This paper examines the methodological issues arising in the measurement of the distributional impact of tax and expenditure policies, with emphasis on the problems related to the measurement of the impact of adjustment programs on the welfare of the poor. Both conceptual and empirical considerations suggest that public expenditures are a more potent instrument for distributional purposes than taxes but are also more difficult to analyze and evaluate. The paper concludes that more research is needed toward a better measurement of expenditure benefits.

The fifteen authors and five commentators include current and former members of the Office of Tax Analysis, the Joint Committee on Taxation, and the Congressional Budget Office, lending an authority to this discussion of tax distributional tables, their methodology, and consideration for improvement. The analysis outlines the attitudes and problems in the current distributional tax methods, innovations in the JCT distribution, the use of generational accounting, transfer systems, and lifetime taxpayer profiles. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR