Poverty-Decreasing Indirect Tax Reforms: Evidence from Tunisia

Sami Bibi () and Jean-Yves Duclos ()

Cahiers de recherche from CIRPEE

Abstract: This paper suggests a methodology to identify socially-desirable directions for poverty-alleviating tax reforms. The cost-benefit ratio of increasing any commodity-tax rate is derived from the minimization of a poverty measure subject to a revenue requirement for the government. Further, to avoid the arbitrariness of choosing a poverty line and a poverty measure, the search for a poverty-reducing tax reform is done "robustly", among other things by increasing progressively the ethical content of a pre-defined class of poverty measures. The methodology is illustrated using data from Tunisia. The results suggest that poverty could be dropped for a large class of poverty indices and a wide range of poverty lines by raising -at constant fiscal revenue- the subsidy rate on hard wheat and mixed oils and by decreasing the one on sugar and milk.

Keywords: Poverty alleviation; Indirect taxation; Targeting; Tunisia (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D12 D63 H53 I32 I38 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu, nep-ltv, nep-mic, nep-pbe and nep-pub
Date: 2004
View list of references View citations in EconPapers

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.cirpee.org/fileadmin/documents/Cahiers_2004/CIRPEE04-03.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Poverty-decreasing indirect tax reforms: Evidence from Tunisia (2007)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:lvl:lacicr:0403

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Cahiers de recherche from CIRPEE
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by Johanne Perron ().