• mandatory expansion of Medicaid programs to cover individuals in households with incomes below 133 percent of the federal poverty level ($14,484 for a single person and $29,726 for a family of four in 2010) • a requirement that states develop and run health insurance exchanges through which individuals and small businesses can purchase health care coverage • a provision that large and mid-siz...

We use three conventional inequality indices—the Gini, the coefficient of variation of income, and the relative mean deviation of income—and the Atkinson index to examine the effect of income tax rates, the minimum wage, and all the major government welfare and transfer programs on the evolution of income inequality for rural and urban areas by state from 1981-1997. We find that these programs ...

Various economic literatures address the question whether first-best prescriptions for government policy require modification because redistributive income taxation distorts labor supply and cannot achieve the distributive ideal. Perhaps second-best rules for public goods provision, corrective taxation, public sector pricing, and other government activity should reflect concerns about distribut...

In a federation with n ≥ 2 regions the relative optimality of six regimesautarky, centralization, unregulated devolution, regulated devolution, direct democracy, and revenue maximising leviathan, is examined. Public policy consists of redistribution and regional public good provision. Regional incomes are uncertain and correlated while estimates of the usefulness of regional public goods are un...

EUROPEAN GOVERNMENTS REDISTRIBUTE income among their citizens on a much larger scale than does the U.S. government. European social programs are more generous and reach a larger share of citizens. European tax systems are more progressive. European regulations designed to protect the poor are more intrusive. In this paper we try to understand why. The literature on the size of government is ric...

A child support guideline is a formula used to calculate support payments based on a few family characteristics. Guidelines began replacing court awarded support payments in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and were later mandated by the federal government in 1988. Two fundamentally different types of guidelines are used: percentage of obligor income, and income shares models. This paper explore...

nigeria has had several housing programmes and policies geared towards the provision of housing her citizens since colonial era to the post-colonial period. the nigerian government had always been directly involved in the provision of housing for the public servants and with the advent of the public-private partnership initiative, the low-income public servants’ acceptability of this new housin...

FOREWORD Status of the report and investigative procedures i i A matter of concern ii Acknowledgements iii CHAPTER 1 SURVEY OF THE WORK OF THE SUBCOMMITTEE 1 1.1 Background 1 1.2 Interim report of the Subcommittee 1 1.3 Media statement no. 15 2 1.4 An overview of submissions received by the Subcommittee The tax authority Definition of the tax base The tax rate Methods of valuation of rural land...

We analyze the impact of trade-induced income shocks on the size of local government, and the provision of public services. Areas in the US with declining labor demand and incomes due to increasing import competition from China experience relative declines in housing prices and business activity. Since local governments are disproportionately funded through property and sales taxation, declinin...

BACKGROUND Most of the about 140 million informal sector workers in urban China do not have health insurance. A 1998 central government policy leaves it to the discretion of municipal governments to offer informal sector workers in cities voluntary participation in a social health insurance for formal sector workers, the so-called 'basic health insurance' (BHI). METHODS We used the contingent...