Indexing out of poverty? Fiscal drag and benefit erosion in cross-national perspective
Authors
Alari Paulus, Holly Sutherland, Iva Valentinova Tasseva
Publication Date
Mar 2019
Summary
We assess how tax‐benefit policy developments in 2001–11 affected the household income distribution in seven EU countries. We use the standard microsimulation‐based decomposition method, separating further the effect of structural policy changes and the uprating of monetary parameters, which allows us to measure the extent of fiscal drag and benefit erosion in practice. The results show that despite different fiscal effects, policies overall mostly reduced poverty and inequality and both types of policy developments had sizeable effects on the income distribution. We also find that the uprating of monetary parameters not only had a positive effect on household incomes, meaning fiscal drag and benefit erosion were avoided, but generally also contributed more to poverty and inequality reduction than structural policy reforms.
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1111/roiw.12413
Publication type
Journal Article
Research area
Tax and benefit systems
Notes
Open Access; © 2019 The Authors. Review of Income and Wealth published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of International Association for Research in Income and Wealth; This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.; Online Early
Related Publications
Cid:525602