Tax Progressivity and Income Inequality PDF Download

Author: Joel Slemrod
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521587761
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 388

View

Book Description
This book assembles nine papers on tax progressivity and its relationship to income inequality, written by leading public finance economists. The papers document the changes during the 1980s in progressivity at the federal, state, and local level in the US. One chapter investigates the extent to which the declining progressivity contributed to the well-documented increase in income inequality over the past two decades, while others investigate the economic impact and cost of progressive tax systems. Special attention is given to the behavioral response to taxation of high-income individuals, portfolio behavior, and the taxation of capital gains. The concluding set of essays addresses the contentious issue of what constitutes a 'fair' tax system, contrasting public attitudes towards alternative tax systems to economists' notions of fairness. Each essay is followed by remarks of a commentator plus a summary of the discussion among contributors.

Author: John Creedy
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780732507657
Category : Income distribution
Languages : en
Pages : 30

View

Book Description

Author: Claudia Gerber
Publisher: International Monetary Fund
ISBN: 1484383087
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 24

View

Book Description
This paper discusses how the structure of the tax system affects its progressivity. It suggests a measure of progressive capacity of tax systems, based on the Kakwani index, but independent of pre-tax income distributions. Using this and other progressivity measures, the paper (i) documents a decline in progressivity over the last decades and (ii) examines the relationship between progressivity and economic growth. Regressions do not reveal a significant impact of progressivity on growth, suggesting that efficiency costs of progressivity may be small—at least for degrees of progressivity observed in the sample.

Author: Jacques Silber
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9401144133
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 669

View

Book Description
Amartya Sen "Equality," I spoke the word As if a wedding vow Ah, but I was so much older then, I am younger than that now. Thus sang Bob Dylan in 1964. Approbation of equality varies not only with our age (though it is not absolutely clear in which direction the values may shift over one's life time), but also with the spirit of the times. The 1960s were good years for singing in praise of equality. The spirit of the present times would probably be better reflected by melodies in admiration of the Federal Reserve System. And yet the technical literature on the evaluation and measurement of economic inequality has grown remarkably over the last three decades. Even as actual economic policies (especially in North America and Europe) have tended to move towards focusing on virtues other than the avoidance of economic inequality, the professional literature on assessing and gauging economic inequality has taken quite a jump forward. A great many different problems have been addressed and effectively sorted out, and new problems continue to be posed and analyzed. The Contents: A Review Jacques Silber has done a great service to the subject by producing this collection of admirablyhelpful and illuminating papers on different aspects of the measurement of income inequality. The reach of this collection is quite remarkable. Along with a thorough overview from the editor himself, the major areas in this complex field have been carefully examined and accessibly discussed.

Author: Sourushe Zandvakili
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780762301331
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 354

View

Book Description
This discussion of inequality and taxation is part of a series which aims to cover a broad spectrum of topics related to economic inequality. The topics covered include such areas as income redistribution, tax changes following the Tax Reform Act of 1986, and alternative tax structures.

Author: Wolfgang Eichhorn
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 3642790372
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 1021

View

Book Description
The literature on economic problems connected with measuring and modelling of welfare and inequality has grown rapidly within the last decade. Since this literature is scattered throughout a great number of journals on economics, economic theory, econometrics, and statisties, it is difficult to get an adequate picture of the present state of the art. Therefore books should appear from time to time, which offer a representative cross-section of the latest results of research on: the subject. This book offers such material. It contains 54 articles by 84 authors from four of the five continents. Each paper has been reviewed by two referees. As a conse quence, the contributions of this book are revised versions, or, in many cases, revised revisions of the original papers. The book is divided into four parts. Part I: Measurement of Inequality and Poverty This part contains eleven papers on theory and empirical applications of inequa lity and/or poverty measures. Two contributions deal with, among other things, experimental findings on questions concerning the acceptance of distributional axioms. Part II: Taxation and Redistribution Distributional or, rather, redistributional aspects play an important role in Part II. The topics of the 14 papers included in this part range from tax progressivity and redistribution, allocative consequences of splitting under income taxation, and connections between income tax and cost-of-living indices to merit goods and welfarism as well as to welfare aspects of tax reforms.

Author: Andreas Pfingsten
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 3642826520
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 139

View

Book Description
I. II. SOME BASIC REMARKS ON TAXATION 2 11. 1 Foundations 3 I I. 2 Data 11. 3 Principles of Taxation 3 I I I. TAX PROGRESSION I I 1. 1 Preliminary Definition 6 7 I I I. 2 Reasons for Progressive Taxation of Incomes IV. MEASURING THE DEGREE OF PROGRESSION IV. l Notation 10 IV. 2 Measures Suggested by Musgrave/Thin 12 IV. 3 Comparison of these Measures 14 IV. 4 A Reason for Using the RIP 17 IV. 5 The Way to Go 17 V. DIFFERENT CONCEPTS OF INEQUALITY V. l Lorenz Curves 19 V. 2 Absolute Inequality-Aversion 19 V. 3 Mixed Inequality-Aversion 20 VI. LOCAL MEASURES OF TAX PROGRESSION VI. l Building Blocks 23 VI. 2 Directly Inequality-Equivalent Tax Functions 26 VI. 3 Directly Inequality-Preserving Tax Functions 29 VI. 4 Scale Invariance 31 VI. 5 Type A 32 VI. 6 Implications 33 VI. 7 Type B 44 VI. 8 Implications 46 VI. 9 Further Desiderata for Type A Measures 50 VI. 10 Conclusions 59 VI VII. PROGRESSION AND THE DESIGN OF TAX FUNCTIONS VII. l Introduction 62 VII. 2 Constant Progressivity Tax Functions 62 VII. 3 Tax Revenue Conditions 71 VI I. 4 The German Income Tax Function and Income Distribution 1981 73 VII. 5 #-Cocop Tax Functions for Germany 78 VIi I. GLOBAL MEASURES OF TAX PROGRESSION VIlLi The Problem 83 VIII. 2 Desirable Properties 84 VIII. 3 Suggestions in the Literature 85 VIII.

Author: Mr.Howell H. Zee
Publisher: International Monetary Fund
ISBN: 145184803X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 30

View

Book Description
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 optimal to finance the targeted transfers with progressive taxation, but that the optimal progressivity increases unambiguously with growing income inequality. This conclusion holds up under different assumptions about the efficiency cost of taxation and society’s aversion to inequality.

Author: Denvil Duncan
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

View

Book Description
This paper examines whether income inequality is affected by the structural progressivity of national income tax systems. Using detailed personal income tax schedules for a large panel of countries, we develop and estimate comprehensive, time-varying measures of structural progressivity of national income tax systems over the 1981-2005 period. We find that while progressivity reduces observed inequality in reported gross and net income, it has a significantly smaller impact on true inequality, approximated by consumption-based measures of Gini. We show theoretically and empirically that, under specific conditions, tax progressivity may increase actual inequality, especially in countries with weak law and order and a large informal nontaxable sector. The paper discusses implications of these results for increasingly popular flat tax policies. The Kuznets hypothesis is also supported by the estimates.

Author: John A. Bishop
Publisher: Emerald Group Publishing
ISBN: 1787564576
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 322

View

Book Description
Research on Economic Inequality, volume 26, primarily contains papers presented at the 8th Society for the Study of Economic Inequality (ECINEQ) meeting. The papers cover such topics as the effect of inheritance taxation on the "pre-distribution" of income, and tax progressivity under alternative inequality definitions.