Suchergebnisse

[cat] El principal objectiu d'aquesta tesi és oferir una panoràmica completa sobre l'evolució de la distribució de la renda a llarg termini a Portugal. Portugal és actualment un dels països més desiguals d'Europa i aquí volem determinar quins són els orígens d'aquest fenomen. Per tal d'assolir aquest objectiu s'han estimat una àmplia varietat d'indicadors proposats per la literatura sobre les desigualtats. Els principals resultats d'aquest treball són els següents. En primer lloc, les desigualtats salarials segueixen una corba en forma de N ajustant-se a la pauta internacional a partir de la segona meitat del segle XX i a les prediccions de la Corba estesa de Kuznets. Per altra banda, els top income shares han caigut fins als anys 1980, però d'aquí en endavant han crescut amb molta intensitat ajustant-se a la pauta distributiva dels països anglosaxons. La desigualtat personal de la renda va augmentar amb molta intensitat durant la primera meitat del règim Salazarista i es va mantenir en uns nivells molt elevats fins al final de la Dictadura. Va caure amb intensitat durant la Revolució del 1974 i va tornar a créixer durant el període democràtic. La ràtio d'extracció també va créixer amb molta intensitat durant els primers anys de la dictadura definint clarament aquest règim com a molt regressiu en l'esfera distributiva. És important destacar que la ràtio d'extracció era més elevada al 2006 que als anys 1920, un fet absolutament extraordinari. Finalment, aquesta tesi també aporta noves estimacions sobre els PIBs regionals de Portugal des de 1890 fins al 1980. Aquestes noves dades mostren com les desigualtats regionals van créixer fins al 1970 per caure durant la següent dècada. També es pot observar una concentració molt intensa de l'activitat econòmica a les regions costeres. Per acabar, el ràpid creixement econòmic de Portugal al llarg del segle XX hauria de ser re-avaluat des del punt de vista social si es mira a l'interior de la caixa negra de la renda per càpita. Aquesta tesi ha il•luminat aquesta caixa negra i ha mostrat com els fruits del creixement econòmic han estat distribuïts persistentment de forma molt desigual. ; [eng] This thesis aims to provide a complete picture on the long term evolution of economic inequality in Portugal. Indeed, Portugal is today one of the most unequal European countries and in this thesis we look at the historical roots of this phenomenon. Last decades, economic historians have provided a wide variety of indexes to estimate the long term evolution of income inequality. In this thesis we estimate all those indexes of inequality proposed by the literature. More concretely, we provide long term series on the evolution of top income and wealth shares, wage inequality, personal income inequality, functional income distribution, the Williamson index, the Extraction ratio, Economic polarization, Welfare and Regional inequality. Wage inequality in Portugal followed an N-curve, increasing until the late 1950s to decline until the 1980, when it turned to increase again. The Portuguese experience fits to the international pattern since the 1950s onwards. The Portuguese case also fits to the Extended Kuznets Curve hypothesis, according to which, wage inequality may follow an N-curve during the transition from an agrarian to a post-industrial society. Top income shares decreased until the 1980 to increase intensively thereafter following the international pattern, and specially the Anglo-Saxon countries experience. Although Leigh (2007) stated that top income shares were a good proxy of income inequality, the Portuguese case shows that this relation may not always hold. In this sense, during Portuguese industrialization top income shares decreased continuously whereas income inequality followed an inverted U-curve, which fits the predictions made by the well-known paper by Kuznets (1955). All approaches to inequality are relevant although this finding shows that they are not equivalent and may evolve in opposite directions. Personal income inequality increased intensively during the first half of the Salazar regime and remained in high levels until the end of the dictatorship. It fell dramatically during the Portuguese revolution of the 1970s and it turned to increase thereafter. The Extraction ratio, which measures the capacity of the economic elites to gather the surplus of an economy also increased intensively during the first half of the dictatorship, clearly defining this regime as deeply regressive in distributional terms. It decreased intensively after the 1950s due to rapid economic growth and turned to increase during the democratic period. The global balance is striking because this index uses to decline in the long term. In Portugal, however, the ER was higher in 2006 than in the 1920s. Finally, this thesis also provides the first long term estimates of regional pc GDP for Portugal since 1890 onwards. Regional inequality increased until the 1970s to decrease afterwards. Increasing regional inequality was due to a long term process of regional specialization, whereas the declining trend was associated to the industrialization of the more backward Portuguese regions. During the period analysed, economic activity concentrated intensively on the Atlantic Coastal regions whereas the inner (and overall northern) regions fell behind. To conclude, Portuguese fast economic growth over the twentieth century should be re-evaluated from the social point of view if we look inside the black box of income per capita. This thesis has enlightened this black box and the vision is rather negative. The fruits of economic growth have not trickled down to most of the population during most of the period studied. As a result, most of the Portuguese have been largely excluded from the growing prosperity of the country.

In this paper I estimate under-assessment of incomes in the Personal Income Tax during the years following its introduction in Spain. The methodology combines an analysis of discrepancy with National Accounts and an econometric exercise, which follows and slightly modifies the Feldman and Slemrod (2007) procedure, based on the relation of reported charitable donations with the composition of income in tax micro-data. Both calculations show that concealment of income differed substantially across sources and levels, with better compliance at the bottom of the distribution of taxpayers. Because of this, fraud made the tax less progressive than it was on paper. Compliance improved over the next decades, but the overall levels were still far from those attained in developed countries, because of lack of administrative capacity or political will to enforce the new regulation. In this way, general, comprehensive income taxation was hardly a reality 20 years after its introduction.

This article marshals empirical evidence from a cross-section of up to 87 countries to consider the impact of clientelism on fiscal redistribution in the form of direct taxes and public transfers. Clientelism may directly undermine fiscal redistribution towards poorer individuals because their political support is cheaper to buy, political patrons will limit redistribution to keep clients dependent and, moreover, will eschew fiscal policies that target broad categories of citizens based on explicit criteria, and favor instead private benefits that they can disburse to individual clients with a relatively high degree of discretion. The empirical analysis controls for a range of potentially confounding covariates, explores various transmission channels and accounts for the real possibility that more extensive redistributive programs may undermine the strength of clientelism. The results strongly suggest that clientelism is inimical to income redistribution towards the poor through taxes and transfers and, moreover, identify reduced public good provision as one indirect channel through which clientelism may undermine fiscal redistribution ; The author would like to thank the following projects for funding support: PID2019-104723RB-I00, PID2020-113452RB-I00 (Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovaci´on). Open Access funding was provided thanks to the CRUE-CSIC agreement with Elsevier

[spa] El objetivo general de la tesis doctoral es evaluar los efectos distributivos de las políticas macroeconómicas. En particular, la tesis evalúa el impacto distributivo de la política fiscal, las políticas monetarias convencionales y no convencionales. El efecto distributivo de la política fiscal se examinó mediante el análisis de las interrelaciones entre el crecimiento económico, la desigualdad de ingresos, y el rendimiento fiscal basada en la evidencia de los países anglosajones. Estas interrelaciones son analizados conjuntamente en un sistema mediante el examen también canales de transmisión entre ellos. Todas las variables son considerados como endógeno en el marco de la metodología de vector de autorregresión estructural. Esto permite la exploración de las interacciones dinámicas entre las variables y los efectos de retroalimentación sobre el uno al otro a través de funciones de impulso respuesta. Además, la tesis ofrece nuevas evidencias sobre las interrelaciones entre el crecimiento económico, la desigualdad de ingresos, y los resultados fiscales mediante el empleo de los datos más largas posibles medidos constantemente sobre la desigualdad de ingresos en una base de país. Los resultados obtenidos muestran que hay diferencias en los resultados obtenidos para los países. En particular, la desigualdad de ingresos tiene un efecto negativo sobre el crecimiento económico en el caso del Reino Unido, mientras que su efecto es positivo en el caso de los EE.UU. y Canadá. El aumento de la desigualdad empeora el rendimiento fiscal para todos los países. El gasto del gobierno reduce la desigualdad de ingresos en el Reino Unido sino que plantea la desigualdad en los EE.UU. y Canadá. Además, los resultados también indican que los ingresos fiscales generalmente aumentan la desigualdad de ingresos en todos los países considerados. Por lo tanto, las medidas del canal de la política fiscal son herramientas importantes a considerar en el diseño de las políticas para reducir la desigualdad. La literatura académica considera generalmente la política fiscal como medida para hacer frente a la creciente desigualdad de ingresos, que es una preocupación generalizada en la actualidad. Aunque la distribución de ingresos también podría verse afectada por la política monetaria, los efectos distributivos de la política monetaria no han sido ampliamente discutido en la literatura. Teniendo esto en cuenta, la tesis contribuye a la discusión en esta área de investigación mediante la evaluación del efecto de la política monetaria sobre la desigualdad de ingresos. El efecto distributivo de la política monetaria se estima en el caso de los EE.UU., donde la dinámica de la desigualdad de ingresos ha estado impulsado principalmente por la variación en el extremo superior de la distribución desde principios de 1980. En consecuencia, la tesis utiliza una medida de desigualdad que representa a toda la distribución del ingreso. Para identificar un choque de política monetaria, la tesis emplea la identificación contemporánea con ex ante shocks de política monetaria identificados, así como la identificación de ejecución de registro. En particular, una relación de cointegración se ha determinado entre las variables consideradas y la metodología de corrección de errores vector se ha aplicado para la identificación del choque de política monetaria. Los resultados obtenidos indican que la política monetaria contractiva reduce la desigualdad total del ingreso en el país. Estos resultados podrían tener implicaciones importantes para el diseño de políticas para reducir la desigualdad de ingresos, dando mayor importancia a la política monetaria. Como consecuencia de la crisis financiera mundial, en general, los bancos centrales han comenzado a poner en práctica la política monetaria no convencional junto con las medidas convencionales de política. Ya existen numerosos estudios sobre el impacto de las medidas de política monetaria no convencionales en el mercado financiero, así como en su efecto macroeconómico. Sin embargo, el efecto distributivo de la política monetaria no convencional no ha sido examinado en esencia todavía. La tesis llena este vacío mediante la evaluación del impacto distributivo de la política monetaria no convencional en comparación con el efecto distributivo de la política monetaria convencional. Los efectos distributivos de las políticas monetarias convencionales y no convencionales son evaluados para el EE.UU. El impacto distributivo de la política monetaria convencional se explora a través de los shocks de política contractivas. Al mismo tiempo, el efecto distributivo de la política monetaria no convencional se estudia a través de perturbaciones de la política de expansión. Los resultados obtenidos indican que la política monetaria convencional reduce la desigualdad de ingresos, mientras que la política monetaria no convencional lo eleva. En particular, el impacto distributivo de la política monetaria convencional es más fuerte. Los resultados también muestran que las políticas monetarias tanto convencionales como no convencionales afectan significativamente a la parte superior de la distribución del ingreso. Mientras que la política monetaria convencional no afecta significativamente a la parte inferior de la distribución del ingreso, la política monetaria no convencional tiene todavía un impacto significativo sobre el mismo. Además, el análisis de descomposición de la varianza aplicado evalúa la importancia relativa de los choques de política monetaria convencionales y no convencionales en la variación del índice de Gini de desigualdad de ingresos. Los resultados obtenidos indican que el choque de política monetaria no convencional explica la mayor parte de la variación en el índice de Gini que el choque de política monetaria convencional. ; [eng] The general objective of the doctoral thesis is to evaluate the distributive effects of macroeconomic policies. In particular, the thesis assesses the distributional impact of fiscal policy, conventional and unconventional monetary policies. The distributive effect of fiscal policy is examined by analyzing the interrelations among economic growth, income inequality, and fiscal performance based on the evidence from the Anglo-Saxon countries. These interrelations are analyzed jointly in a system by examining also transmission channels among them. All the variables are regarded as endogenous within the framework of the structural vector autoregression methodology. This allows exploring dynamic interactions among the variables and feedback effects on each other through impulse response functions. In addition, the thesis provides new evidence on interrelations among economic growth, income inequality, and fiscal performance by employing the longest possible consistently measured data on income inequality on a country basis. The obtained results show that there are differences in the obtained results for the countries. Particularly, income inequality has negative effect on economic growth in the case of the UK while its effect is positive in the cases of the USA and Canada. The increase in inequality worsens fiscal performance for all the countries. Government spending reduces income inequality in the UK but it raises inequality in the USA and Canada. In addition, the results also indicate that tax revenues generally raise income inequality in all the considered countries. Thus, the measures of the fiscal policy channel are important tools to consider in the design of the policies to decrease inequality. The academic literature generally views fiscal policy as a measure to address growing income inequality, which is a widespread concern nowadays. Although the income distribution could also be affected by monetary policy, the distributive effects of monetary policy have not broadly been discussed in the literature. Taking this into account, the thesis contributes to the discussion in this research area by evaluating the effect of monetary policy on income inequality. The distributional effect of monetary policy is estimated in the case of the USA, where the dynamics in income inequality has mainly been driven by the variation in the upper end of distribution since early 1980's. Consequently, the thesis uses an inequality measure that represents the whole distribution of income. To identify a monetary policy shock, the thesis employs contemporaneous identification with ex-ante identified monetary policy shocks as well as log run identification. In particular, a cointegration relation has been determined among the considered variables and the vector error correction methodology has been applied for the identification of the monetary policy shock. The obtained results indicate that contractionary monetary policy decreases the overall income inequality in the country. These results could have important implications for the design of policies to reduce income inequality by giving more weight to monetary policy. In the wake of the global financial crisis, central banks have generally begun to implement unconventional monetary policy together with conventional policy measures. There are already numerous studies on the impact of unconventional monetary policy measures on financial market as well as on their macroeconomic effect. However, the distributive effect of unconventional monetary policy has not essentially been examined yet. The thesis fills this gap by evaluating the distributive impact of unconventional monetary policy in comparison with the distributional effect of conventional monetary policy. The distributional effects of conventional and unconventional monetary policies are evaluated for the USA. The distributive impact of conventional monetary policy is explored through contractionary policy shocks. At the same time, the distributional effect of unconventional monetary policy is studied via expansionary policy shocks. The obtained results indicate that conventional monetary policy reduces income inequality while unconventional monetary policy raises it. In particular, the distributive impact of conventional monetary policy is stronger. The results also show that the both conventional and unconventional monetary policies significantly affect the upper part of income distribution. While conventional monetary policy does not significantly affect the lower part of income distribution, unconventional monetary policy has still a significant impact on it. In addition, the implemented variance decomposition analysis assesses the relative importance of conventional and unconventional monetary policy shocks in the variation of Gini index of income inequality. The obtained results indicate that the unconventional monetary policy shock explains the higher share of the variation in Gini index than the conventional monetary policy shock.

Capital taxation is currently under debate, basically due to problems of administrative control and proper assessment of the levied assets. We analyze both problems focusing on a capital tax, the annual wealth tax (WT), which is only applied in five OECD countries, being Spain one of them. We concentrate our analysis on top 1% adult population, which permits us to describe the evolution of wealth concentration in Spain along 1983-2001. On average top 1% holds about 18% of total wealth, which rises to 19% when tax incompliance and under-assessment is corrected for housing, the main asset. The evolution suggests wealth concentration has risen. Regarding WT, we analyze whether it helps to reduce wealth inequality or, on the contrary, it reinforces vertical inequity (due to especial concessions) and horizontal inequity (due to the de iure and to de facto different treatment of assets). We analyze in detail housing and equity shares. By means of a time series analysis, we relate the reported values with reasonable price indicators and proxies of the propensity to save. We infer net tax compliance is extremely low, which includes both what we commonly understand by (gross) tax compliance and the degree of under-assessment due to fiscal legislation (for housing). That is especially true for housing, whose level of net tax compliance is well below 50%. Hence, we corroborate the difficulties in taxing capital, and so cast doubts on the current role of the WT in Spain in reducing wealth inequality.

In this paper we analyze the effects of both tactical and programmatic politics on the inter-regional allocation of infrastructure investment. We use a panel of data for the Spanish electoral districts during the period 1964-2004 to estimate an equation where investment depends both on economic and political variables. The results show that tactical politics do matter since, after controlling for economic traits, the districts with more 'Political power' still receive more investment. These districts are those where the incumbents' Vote margin of victory/ defeat in the past election is low, where the Marginal seat price is low, where there is Partisan alignment between the executives at the central and regional layers of government, and where there are Pivotal regional parties which are influential in the formation of the central executive. However, the results also show that programmatic politics matter, since inter-regional redistribution (measured as the elasticity of investment to per capita income) is shown to increase with the arrival of the Democracy and EU Funds, with Left governments, and to decrease the higher is the correlation between a measure of 'Political power' and per capita income.

What explains citizen preferences for redistribution across regions within a country? Around the world, countries vary greatly in how much central governments tax wealthier regions to redistribute to poorer ones in order to reduce inequality across regions. In many federations or multi-tiered polities, these issues are salient, electorally contested, and at times polarizing; they have sometimes led to demands for or attempts at secession from disaffected regions. Such issues have been politicized in wealthy countries including Belgium, Canada, Italy, Spain, the United Kingdom, as well as in poorer or middle-income states including Argentina, Brazil, China, India, Mexico, and Russia. Yet the recent growth in research on the causes and consequences of different federal arrangements and fiscal federalism have not studied in depth the roots of individual preferences over basic issues related to federal institutions and fiscal federalism. This omission is surprising given the high salience of this package of issues in such countries.

We study the political economy of state limitations on the taxing powers of local governments, investigating the effects of such restriction on housing markets, community composition, and types of taxes and expenditures undertaken by local governments. We characterize equilibrium when voters choose values of multiple policy (tax and expenditure) instruments, finding that tax limitations have very substantial effects on housing prices and the composition of communities. Political support for tax limits comes from suburban voters and from a subset of central-city voters. Support for tax limits come even from residents of communities that are not constrained by the limits.

In this paper we analyze the effects of both tactical and programmatic politics on the inter-regional allocation of infrastructure investment. We use a panel of data for the Spanish electoral districts during the period 1964-2004 to estimate an equation where investment depends both on economic and political variables. The results show that tactical politics do matter since, after controlling for economic traits, the districts with more 'Political power' still receive more investment. These districts are those where the incumbents' Vote margin of victory/ defeat in the past election is low, where the Marginal seat price is low, where there is Partisan alignment between the executives at the central and regional layers of government, and where there are Pivotal regional parties which are influential in the formation of the central executive. However, the results also show that programmatic politics matter, since inter-regional redistribution (measured as the elasticity of investment to per capita income) is shown to increase with the arrival of the Democracy and EU Funds, with Left governments, and to decrease the higher is the correlation between a measure of 'Political power' and per capita income.

We analyse the redistributive power of the Spanish central government budget to diminish regional disparities in per capita income in the 1991-1996 period. It firstly makes a brief overview of the most relevant empirical studies carried out on this subject, analysing their methodologies and results. Secondly, it estimates the redistributive power of the budgetary policies of the Spanish central government. Its principal interest lies in the fact that the data base used allows the redistributive effect of the main items of revenue and expenditure to be analysed, whereas the majority of studies carried out limit the categories of expenditure to the case of transfers. The results obtained are in line with those from other studies. The redistributive power of the central budget is around 40%, expenditure being much more redistributive than revenue, with the exception of individual income tax.

Before 1977, the Spanish government was unable (or unwilling) to increase taxation to finance new social programs. As an alternative to this lack of fiscal capacity, Spanish policy makers in the early 20th century promoted contributive social Insurance schemes (mostly financed from employers' and employees' contributions). To avoid social conflict in rural areas, rural laborers were also included in these programs. This, however, generated strong business opposition, especially from rural landowners and small-sized, labor intensive businesses (which were predominant in Spain). With the advent of democracy in 1931 new social plans were devised, but redistribution demands focused on land reform. After the Spanish civil war, Franco's dictatorship consolidated a conservative social insurance model. Social benefits were kept very low and funding relied on employers' and employees' compulsory contributions. Labor moviment repression and trade protectionism allowed companies to easily transfer the cost of social insurance to wages and consumer prices. The introduction of income tax, after the restoration of democracy in 1977, gave way to a new social protection model. Taxfunded, non-contributory programs increased and social protection was extended to those without stable ties to the labor market. By 1977 wage dispersion had replaces property incomes concentration -particularly land ownership- as the main source of income inequality, and demands for tax-and-transfer redistribution replaced 1930s expropriation demands. Social spending growth, however, stagnated after the signing of the Maastricht treaty, before Spain reached the European levels.

[spa] El actual proceso de integración económica y monetaria en el que está inmersa la Unión Europea, está suscitando debates muy intensos en la literatura económica y es precisamente en este contexto donde se inscribe la presente investigación. En concreto, el objetivo de esta tesis doctoral es abordar desde un punto de vista teórico-normativo y bajo la perspectiva de la teoría del Federalismo Fiscal el papel redistributivo que le corresponde a la Unión Europea como gobierno de ámbito supranacional y cuantificar la capacidad redistributiva del presupuesto comunitario durante los años 1995-97.Para conseguir alcanzar estos propósitos y con la finalidad de abordar de manera ordenada y sistemática todas las posibles cuestiones, la tesis se estructura en cuatro grandes partes que engloban ocho capítulos.La primera parte tiene un carácter introductorio. En ella se define y contextualiza a la Unión Europea como nivel de gobierno de carácter supranacional en comparación con los gobiernos federales. Y, además, se analiza la evolución del sistema de financiación comunitario y de las distintas políticas de gasto. De dicho análisis se desprende que, a pesar de que la Unión Europea se la pueda considerar como una administración supranacional, todavía no ha adquirido las condiciones necesarias para convertirse en un verdadero y auténtico gobierno federal.Partiendo de esta premisa, en la segunda parte se desarrolla el marco teórico sobre el que sustentar la asignación de actuaciones redistributivas a nivel comunitario a partir de la teoría del federalismo fiscal. Para ello se revisan las aportaciones de dicha teoría en el campo de la redistribución y se formula un modelo normativo adaptado a la realidad comunitaria.La traslación de los postulados del federalismo fiscal a la realidad comunitaria evidencia que, actualmente, no existen las condiciones necesarias para atribuir a la Unión Europea actuaciones en materia de redistribución personal. Ello es debido a la existencia de preferencias redistributivas distintas entre los diferentes países miembros, al bajo grado de movilidad de los ciudadanos comunitarios entre países y al hecho de que los beneficios de la redistribución se diluyen a medida que se amplia el ámbito geográfico.En cambio, desde esta teoría se demuestra la necesidad de que la Unión Europea desempeñe un papel mucho más activo en la redistribución de tipo territorial, tanto para corregir problemas de equidad horizontal generados por su propia actuación y por la actuación de los gobiernos subcentrales, como para paliar los desequilibrios territoriales de renta existentes y los que pueda generar el propio proceso integrador.Estos razonamientos han sido modelizados en la presente tesis a través de un modelo teórico normativo basado en funciones de bienestar interdependientes, inspirado en el propuesto por Tresch (1981), con el propósito de asignar la redistribución personal y territorial entre los distintos niveles de gobierno. Del desarrollo de este modelo se desprende que en la medida que la redistribución pueda considerarse un bien público con demandas territoriales diferenciadas, con unos beneficios que se diluyen al ampliarse el ámbito territorial y con unas preferencias por la solidaridad ligadas a la identificación nacional, una solución de máxima centralización de la función redistributiva será la que proporcione una pauta redistributiva de menor intensidad, en contraposición a una redistribución descentralizada. En consecuencia, la pauta distributiva implícita en la función de bienestar social de la Unión Europea será menos igualitaria que la derivada de las funciones de bienestar de los otros niveles de gobierno. Y que la existencia de considerables demandas territoriales diferenciadas en cuanto a la redistribución personal dentro de la Unión Europea, propicia que el papel redistributivo de dicha administración se encamine al ámbito territorial para hacer efectivos los objetivos de equidad horizontal, desarrollo regional y cohesión económica y social.Esta conclusión ha propiciado que se lleve a cabo un análisis de los desequilibrios territoriales en el nivel de renta en la Unión Europea y sus factores determinantes tanto a partir de los principales modelos teóricos interpretativos como de las aportaciones empíricas más relevantes. Asimismo, se detallan los factores que de un modo específico inciden en las disparidades territoriales de renta dentro de la propia Unión Europea como son, entre otros, el propio proceso de integración económica y monetaria.Una vez definido en marco normativo, se examinan los distintos instrumentos de que dispone actualmente la Unión Europea para llevar a cabo la redistribución territorial, los cuales se agrupan en dos grandes categorías: la regulación y el presupuesto. Dentro de las medidas presupuestarias la redistribución territorial puede implementarse o bien mediante instrumentos específicos o bien a través del presupuesto global, ya que cualquier actuación pública, ya sea por el lado de los ingresos o de los gastos, tiene un efecto distributivo y ello a pesar de que las acciones emprendidas no tengan un objetivo redistributivo explícito. Es por este motivo que se ha examinado el poder redistributivo de la Unión Europea a partir de un análisis global en el que se evalúen los efectos redistributivos del total de las actuaciones presupuestarias. En este sentido, en la tercera parte se ha procedido a analizar empíricamente la capacidad redistributiva del presupuesto de la Unión Europea para disminuir las disparidades nacionales y regionales de renta en los años 1995-97. Para ello, se ha procedido previamente a construir una base de datos que proporcione información territorializada sobre los ingresos y gastos comunitarios tanto por países como por regiones, así como los saldos fiscales de dichos territorios con la Unión Europea. La estimación de los flujos fiscales nacionales y regionales derivados del presupuesto de la Unión Europea ha requerido establecer los aspectos metodológicos sobre los que se ha asentado dicha estimación tales como la explicitación del concepto de saldo fiscal, los criterios seguidos en la imputación territorial de los ingresos y gastos comunitarios, la delimitación del ámbito de estudio, así como revisar los principales antecedentes existentes. La imputación territorial de los ingresos se ha realizado a partir de la aplicación de las hipótesis establecidas por la teoría de la incidencia económica sobre la traslación de la carga fiscal a los distintos recursos comunitarios. Por su parte, la imputación territorial de las distintas partidas de gasto se ha efectuado bajo un doble enfoque: el del flujo monetario, es decir, en función de dónde se localiza el gasto y el del flujo del beneficio, o sea, en función de la localización de los beneficiarios de ese gasto. Una vez obtenidos los flujos fiscales de cada una de las regiones y países considerados con el presupuesto de la Unión Europea, se analiza empíricamente la capacidad redistributiva de la Unión Europea para disminuir las disparidades territoriales de renta. Para ello se realiza, previamente, una revisión de la literatura existente al objeto de justificar las opciones metodológicas escogidas. Seguidamente, se estima la capacidad redistributiva de los ingresos y gastos comunitarios por grandes categorías y del presupuesto global de la Unión Europea. La metodología utilizada es una combinación del método basado en las elasticidades, el de la renta disponible y el de los saldos fiscales, ya que una vez analizado el grado de progresividad de los distintos instrumentos de ingresos, gastos y saldos fiscales, se estudia su poder redistributivo que depende, no sólo del grado de progresividad, sino de su importancia cuantitativa sobre la renta regional. Los resultados alcanzados demuestran que la capacidad de reducir las diferencias territoriales de renta de la Unión Europea se sitúa en un 6% en la muestra regional y en un 7% en la muestra nacional cuando la distribución del gasto se efectúa de acuerdo con el enfoque del flujo del beneficio, mientras que cuando el gasto comunitario se distribuye de acuerdo al enfoque del flujo monetario, el poder de redistribución entre regiones disminuye a un 3,40%, y a nivel de países se agravan, incluso, las disparidades en un 3,46%. En la cuarta parte se presenta una recapitulación del trabajo de investigación realizado y las principales conclusiones que de él se derivan. ; [eng] This Thesis has a double aim: first, to analyse under the perspective of fiscal federalism the role of the European Union in the redistributive function and, second to estimate the redistributive effects among regions and States of the European Union budget in the 1995-97. The Thesis is structured in four parts. In the first part, European Union is analysed as a supranational government level in comparison with federal government. Additional1y, a special reference is made to the evolution of the European Union financing system and of its expenditure policy-making. In the second part, theory of the fiscal federalism is developed in order to defend the attribution of redistributional policy to European Union. Specifically, a survey of the contributions that this theory in the ambit of the redistribution is made and a normative model inspired in the Tresch model and adapted to reality of European community is designed. This model permits to assign the redistributive policy to European Union, specially that deals with territorial redistribution. In the third part, the Thesis analyse the redistributive power of the European Union budget to diminish territorial disparities in the capita income in the 1995-97 period. First of all, it has been necessary to assign the community resources (net traditional own resources, VAT and GNP revenues and total resources), the community expenditures (the guarantee section of the European Agricultural Guarantee and Guidance Fund, structural actions, investment and development, and rest of expenditures), among States and regions and to estimate the fiscal balance. Secondly, it makes a brief overview of the most relevant empirical studies carried out on this subject, analysing their methodologies and results. Thirdly, it estimates the redistributive effects of the European Union budget among European regions and States. We analyze three types of relationship: I) income and EU resources, II) income and groups of expenditures, III) income and fiscal balance. The Thesis also estimated the elasticity of every concept and their impact on disposable income. In the fourth part, we recapitulate and conclude.

In this paper we examine the effect of tax policy on the relationship between inequality and growth in a two-sector non-scale model. With non-scale models, the longrun equilibrium growth rate is determined by technological parameters and it is independent of macroeconomic policy instruments. However, this fact does not imply that fiscal policy is unimportant for long-run economic performance. It indeed has important effects on the different levels of key economic variables such as per capita stock of capital and output. Hence, although the economy grows at the same rate across steady states, the bases for economic growth may be different. The model has three essential features. First, we explicitly model skill accumulation, second, we introduce government finance into the production function, and we introduce an income tax to mirror the fiscal events of the 1980's and 1990's in the US. The fact that the non-scale model is associated with higher order dynamics enables it to replicate the distinctly non-linear nature of inequality in the US with relative ease. The results derived in this paper attract attention to the fact that the non-scale growth model does not only fit the US data well for the long-run (Jones, 1995b) but also that it possesses unique abilities in explaining short term fluctuations of the economy. It is shown that during transition the response of the relative simulated wage to changes in the tax code is rather non-monotonic, quite in accordance to the US inequality pattern in the 1980's and early 1990's. More specifically, we have analyzed in detail the dynamics following the simulation of an isolated tax decrease and an isolated tax increase. So, after a tax decrease the skill premium follows a lower trajectory than the one it would follow without a tax decrease. Hence we are able to reduce inequality for several periods after the fiscal shock. On the contrary, following a tax increase, the evolution of the skill premium remains above the trajectory carried on by the skill premium under a situation with no tax increase. Consequently, a tax increase would imply a higher level of inequality in the economy ; - En aquest article s'examina l'efecte de la política impositiva en la relació entre desigualtat i creixement en el marc d'un model non-scale amb dos sectors. Amb models del tipus non-scale, l'equilibri de llarg termini ve determinat pels paràmetres tecnològics i és independent dels instruments de política macroeconòmica. Ara bé, aquesta situació no implica que la política fiscal no intervingui en l'activitat econòmica en el llarg termini. De fet, té importants efectes en els nivells de variables econòmiques tals com l'estoc de capital i la producció. Així doncs, tot i que l'economia creixi a la mateixa taxa en els diferents estats estacionaris, les bases pel creixement econòmic poden diferir. El model té tres aspectes essencials que el caracteritzen. En primer lloc, hem modelat l'acumulació d'habilitats; en segon, hem introduït el govern a la funció de producció; finalment, hem incorporat un impost sobre la renda per tal de reproduir els canvis fiscals que es produiren als Estats Units durant els anys vuitanta i noranta. El fet que els models non-scale es trobin associats amb dinàmiques d'ordre elevat ens permet replicar la naturalesa de la desigualtat americana de manera força acurada. Així, els resultats obtinguts en aquest article ens mostren com el nostre model no només capta l'evolució en el llarg termini (Jones, 1995b), sinó que també és capaç d'explicar les fluctuacions econòmiques en el curt termini. De fet, es mostra com durant la transició, la resposta del skill premium simulat envers els canvis impositius és no-monotònica, seguint el patró de la desigualtat americana dels anys vuitanta i noranta. Més concretament, hem analitzat amb un cert detall la dinàmica fruit de la simulació d'un increment i d'una reducció impositives aïllades, tot i comprovant que després d'una davallada impositiva, el skill premium segueix una trajectòria inferior a la seguida sense el decrement impositiu. Vist això, es pot dir que la desigualtat minva durant els períodes que segueixen el canvi fiscal. Per altra banda, després d'un increment impositiu, el skill premium roman per sobre de la trajectòria prèvia a l'augment. Per tant, un increment impositiu implicaria un nivell de desigualtat superior a l'existent fins aleshores a l'economia.