 Health, fairness and taxationNo 2012016, LIDAM Discussion Papers CORE from Université catholique de Louvain, Center for Operations Research and Econometrics (CORE) Abstract: We consider a model where agents differ in their preferences about consumption labor and health, in their (health-dependent) earning ability, and in their health disposition. We study the joint taxation of income and health expenditure, under incentive-compatibility constraints, on the basis of efficiency and fairness principles. The fairness principles we consider propose, on one side, to reduce inequalities deriving from factors that do not depend on individuals' responsibility. On the other side, redistribution should be precluded at least when all agents in the economy have equal physical characteristics. We construct, on the basis of such principles, a particular social welfare function. Then we give the explicit formula for the comparison of tax policies: we prove that a tax reform should always benefit agents with the worst earning ability and the worst health disposition first. Finally, at the bottom of the income distribution the optimal tax scheme should exhibit non-uniform tax rates over health expenditure and non-positive average marginal tax rates over income. Keywords: income tax; health subsidies; endogenous skills; policy evaluation; optimal tax; fairness (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cor:louvco:2012016 Access Statistics for this paper More papers in LIDAM Discussion Papers CORE from Université catholique de Louvain, Center for Operations Research and Econometrics (CORE) Voie du Roman Pays 34, 1348 Louvain-la-Neuve (Belgium). Contact information at EDIRC. |
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