Poverty-Reducing Tax Reforms with Heterogeneous Agents

Poverty-Reducing Tax Reforms with Heterogeneous Agents

The poverty impact of indirect tax reforms is analyzed using sequential stochastic dominance methods. This allows agents to differ in dimensions that cannot always be precisely captured within the usual money-metric indicators of living standards. Examples of such dimensions include household size and composition, temporal or spatial variation in price indices, and individual needs and “merits”.

Between - Group Transfers and Poverty - Reducing Tax Reforms

In this paper, we propose the conception of Within-group Consumption-Dominance Curves in order to capture the impact of indirect tax reforms on poverty. Considering that the population is partitioned into many groups, which differ in needs, in health, in capability or other attributes, we introduce within-group transfers and between-group transfers via indirect taxation mechanisms in order to r...

Socially-Efficient Tax Reforms∗

We propose graphical methods to determine whether commodity-tax changes are “socially efficient”, in the sense of improving social welfare or decreasing poverty for large classes of social welfare and poverty indices. We also derive estimators of critical poverty lines and economic efficiency ratios which can be used to characterize socially-efficient tax reforms. The statistical properties of ...

Poverty, Inequality and Reforms Pranab Bardhan I. Reforms Growth Poverty Reduction II. Poverty and Inequality Opposition to Reforms

Tax Reform and Poverty

The tax system has a pervasive impact on poverty, both directly through its role in the distribution of society’s resources and indirectly through its effects on the incentives for economic decisions like working and saving. The two most important facets of the tax system for low-income families are payroll taxes and the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), the former of which levies a tax on earne...