Analytic Foundations: Measuring the Redistributive Impact of Taxes and Transfers

Ali Enami, Nora Lustig and Rodrigo Aranda

No 446, Working Papers from Center for Global Development

Abstract: This paper provides a theoretical foundation for analyzing the redistributive effect of taxes and transfers for the case in which the ranking of individuals by pre-fiscal income remains unchanged. We show that in a world with more than a single fiscal instrument, the simple rule that progressive taxes or transfers are always equalizing not necessarily holds, and offer alternative rules that survive a theoretical scrutiny. In particular, we show that the sign of the marginal contribution unambiguously predicts whether a tax or a transfer is equalizing or not.

Keywords: Taxes; subsidies; redistribution; fiscal transfers (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 72 pages
Date: 2017-01-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cta and nep-pbe
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cgdev.org/publication/analytic-foundat ... l&utm_campaign=repec (text/html)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 403 Forbidden
https://www.cgdev.org/sites/default/files/analytic ... -taxes-transfers.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Analytic Foundations: Measuring the Redistributive Impact of Taxes and Transfers (2016)
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:cgd:wpaper:446

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Center for Global Development Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Publications Manager ().