 To What Extent do Fiscal Regimes Equalize Opportunities for Income Acquisition Among Citizens?John Roemer, Rolf Aaberge, Ugo Colombino, Johan Fritzell, Stephen Jenkins, Ive Marx, Marianne Page, Evert Pommer, Javier Ruiz-Castillo, Maria Jesus San Segundo, Torben Tranaes (), Gert Wagner and Ignacio Zubiri No 222, Discussion Papers of DIW Berlin from DIW Berlin, German Institute for Economic Research Abstract: This project employs the theory of equality of opportunity, described in Roemer's book (Equality of Opportunity, Harvard University Press, 1998), to compute the extent to which tax-and-transfer regimes in ten countries equalize opportunities among citizens for income acquisition. Roughly speaking, equality of opportunity for incomes has been achieved in a country when it is the case that the distributions of post-fisc income are the same for different types of citizen, where a citizen's type is defined by the socioeconomic status of his parents. Intuitively, a country will have equalized opportunity if the chances of earning high (or low) income are equal for citizens from all family backgrounds. Of course, pre-fisc income distributions, by type, will not be identical, as long as the educational system does not entirely make up for the disadvantage that children, who come from poor families face, but the tax-and-transfer system can play a role in rectifying that inequality. We include, in our computation, two numbers that summarize the extent to which each country's current fiscal regime achieves equalization of opportunities for income, and the deadweight loss that would be incurred by moving to the regime that does. JEL-codes: D63 H0 (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:diw:diwwpp:dp222 Access Statistics for this paper More papers in Discussion Papers of DIW Berlin from DIW Berlin, German Institute for Economic Research Contact information at EDIRC. |
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