Individual welfare, social deprivation and income taxation

Satya Chakravarty and Patrick Moyes ()

Economic Theory, 2003, vol. 21, issue 4, 843-869

Abstract: In a homogeneous framework where individuals can only be distinguished on the basis of their incomes, we examine the incidence of taxation on the amount of deprivation felt in the society. We conceive deprivation in terms of utility or well-being rather than just in terms of income and we measure it by comparing the deprivation profiles arising in the different situations. We identify the restrictions to be imposed on the utility function which guarantee that a more progressive system of taxes always results in less social deprivation. We show that, in general, it is not possible to get an equivalence and realize a social improvement in terms of social deprivation by substituting a more progressive system of taxes for a less progressive one. Copyright Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2003

Keywords: Keywords and Phrases: Welfarism; Taxation; Progressivity; Deprivation; Individual welfare.; JEL Classification Numbers: D31; D63; H24. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2003
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (27)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s00199-002-0276-9 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: Individual welfare, social deprivation and income taxation (2003)
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:spr:joecth:v:21:y:2003:i:4:p:843-869

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... eory/journal/199/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s00199-002-0276-9

Access Statistics for this article

Economic Theory is currently edited by Nichoals Yanneils

More articles in Economic Theory from Springer, Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().