Suchergebnisse

Public spending in the UK in 2008/9 amounted to over £10,000 per person or about 43% of national income (Crawford, Emmerson and Tetlow 2009) while net receipts from tax and social security contributions exceeded £8,000 per person or about 35% of national income. These transfers of resources between individuals and the state, either as cash payments or as supply of goods, affect individual standards of living and do so in ways that differ markedly between different households. Assessing the impact of government activity on the distribution of household living standards is essential to the evaluation of public service provision but raises challenging conceptual issues that we discuss in this report.

The combined effect of taxes and social spending in Romania helps to reduce inequality, although less so than in other European Union countries. However, the combination of direct and indirect taxes and transfers leads to an increase in poverty, as direct cash transfers to poor households are not large enough to compensate them for the burden of indirect taxes. This is especially important for rural households and families with children. Moreover, recent reductions in the rates for personal income and value-added taxes are expected to have led to an increase in inequality, as most of the tax relief accrued to the top of the income distribution. Although these changes likely helped to reduce poverty, they were an expensive way to achieve a small decline in the poverty rate. Higher and better targeted social assistance spending could have achieved better distributional results at a much lower fiscal cost. These results call for greater use of simulation tools that could inform policy makers and the public of the fiscal costs and redistributive impacts of proposed reforms.

This article examines the lifetime redistributive impact of government health outlays and finds that such outlays redistribute income from the lifetime rich to the lifetime poor and from men to women.

In a context of fiscal consolidation and the need to deliver on a structural reform agenda, policy makers in Albania must not lose sight of the critical redistributive role of the fiscal system, particularly its impact on poverty and inequality. Using household survey data, this paper estimates the redistributive effect of fiscal policy on income distribution and poverty in Albania, assessing the individual and combined effects of taxes and public social spending. The findings show that the fiscal system in Albania plays a positive role in reducing inequality. Yet, it has a moderate poverty-increasing effect. Specifically, taxes and social protection contributions have a poverty-increasing effect; indirect taxes, particularly the value-added tax, account for the largest increases in poverty. This effect is somewhat compensated by direct government transfers, which are pro-poor and equalizing, but are not large enough to offset fully the negative impact on the taxation side. Ongoing reforms aimed at improving the efficiency and targeting of social assistance can contribute to enhancing the pro-poor impact of the fiscal system.