The Distributional Impacts of Meal Vouchers in the Czech Republic

Petr Janský and Lenka Röhryová

Prague Economic Papers, 2016, vol. 2016, issue 6, 706-722

Abstract: This article aims to analyse the distributional impacts of the meal voucher system in the Czech Republic, especially concerning income inequality. It analyses the redistributive effects of meal allowances on various income deciles providing rough estimates of the impact of meal allowance tax exemption on the government budget and simulating several scenarios for the replacement of the current meal allowance scheme with flat meal allowances. We estimate that meal allowance tax relief represents a direct burden of around 11.3 billion Czech korunas for the state budget, although this approximation does not take indirect effects into account and could thus be an overestimate. We provide evidence which suggests that the current form of meal allowances widens the income gap between beneficiaries and non-beneficiaries, within as well as across the income deciles. Affluent households receive meal allowances more frequently, and, moreover, the allowances they receive are both nominally and proportionately higher. According to our simulation using a constant budget of the size of our rough estimate replacing the current meal allowance scheme with a flat meal allowance system would promote income equality. Such a change would benefit the lower deciles, due to a higher share of individuals in these deciles being entitled to meal allowances, while the upper decile households would see a decline in their meal allowances.

Keywords: meal allowances; income inequality; redistributive effects; tax reliefs (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D31 H23 H24 J32 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://pep.vse.cz/doi/10.18267/j.pep.587.html (text/html)
http://pep.vse.cz/doi/10.18267/j.pep.587.pdf (application/pdf)
free of charge

Related works:
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: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:prg:jnlpep:v:2016:y:2016:i:6:id:587:p:706-722

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
Editorial office Prague Economic Papers, University of Economics, nám. W. Churchilla 4, 130 67 Praha 3, Czech Republic
http://pep.vse.cz

DOI: 10.18267/j.pep.587

Access Statistics for this article

Prague Economic Papers is currently edited by Klára Pavlová

More articles in Prague Economic Papers from Prague University of Economics and Business Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Stanislav Vojir ().