Welfare analysis and redistributive policies

Author

Olivier Bargain

Publication Date

Dec 2017

Summary

Applied welfare analyses of redistributive systems nowadays benefit from powerful tax-benefit microsimulation programs combined with administrative data. Arguably, most of the distributional studies of that kind focus on social welfare defined as a function – typically inequality or poverty indices – of household equivalized income. In parallel, economic research has made considerable progress in the measurement of welfare along several dimensions. Distinct but related branches of the literature have attempted (i) to model different behavior (in a way that matter for incidence and redistribution of tax-benefit policies), (ii) to go beyond income, (iii) to better define and estimate equivalence scales, (iv) to open the household black box and measure welfare at the individual level. I suggest a general framework to critically review these streams of literatures and to discuss whether recent advances in each of these fields have been or could be readily operationalized in welfare analyses and policy simulations.

Volume and page numbers

Volume: 15 , p.393 -419

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1007/s10888-017-9369-3

Publication type

Journal Article

Research areas

Health and wellbeing, Tax and benefit systems

Links

University of Essex, Albert Sloman Library Periodicals (except current 12 months) *restricted to University of Essex registered users* - http://serlib0.essex.ac.uk/record=b1656724~S5

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Related Publications

• Welfare analysis and redistributive policies

  Olivier Bargain, EUROMOD Working Paper Series -30 Oct 2017

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