1,721,397 research outputs found
Tax and benefit policies in the enlarged Europe: assessing the impact with microsimulation models
No full textThis book offers the first systematic assessment of income redistribution in Eastern Europe, within a comparative European perspective, and it demonstrates the future research potential of microsimulation techniques in this region. The book’s chapters are based on a unique instrument -- EUROMOD: the European tax-benefit microsimulation model, which has been enlarged to include Estonia, Hungary, Poland, Slovenia and other countries. Tax-benefit models such as EUROMOD are computer programmes based on household micro-data, which calculate each household’s disposable income. Microsimulation can be used to evaluate the impact of current taxes and benefit policies on individuals’ incomes and work incentives. In addition, the model is designed to answer ‘what if’ questions about different policy reforms, allowing the potential effects of proposed changes to be studied before their actual implementation. EUROMOD goes one step further in the process of helping policy design, in allowing international comparisons between EU countries. This book offers an important demonstration of the effectiveness of tax-benefit models in presenting complex information in a concise and comprehensible way. It discusses what the barriers to their adoption to date have been and it looks at the possibilities EUROMOD offers to future policy-making in Europe
The financial well-being of elderly people in Europe and the redistributive effects of minimum pension schemes
No full textThis study analyses the financial well-being of elderly people across Europe. Using the European microsimulation model EUROMOD, which facilitates the identification of minimum pension schemes in a comparable way across countries, we gather together new empirical findings on the redistributive effects of the minimum pension schemes in a range of European countries. In particular, we quantify the extent to which these schemes contribute to alleviate elderly poverty across Europe. Nevertheless, the financial well-being of older people depends crucially on the pension system as a whole. Countries with generous minimum pension schemes seem to allocate relatively fewer resources to other pillars of the pension system. On the one hand, they are more effective in reducing elderly poverty rates. On the other hand, they fail to ensure a level of financial well-being of older people in line with the overall population
Accounting for Housing in Poverty Analysis
Full text linkThe treatment of housing in the definition of income used to measure poverty makes a big difference to who is counted as poor. Both the Before Housing Costs (BHC) and After Housing Costs (AHC) measures in current use in the UK pose problems. BHC income does not capture the advantages of living in owner-occupied housing and AHC income might not account for the benefits of living in higher-quality accommodation. We explore the potential of including in income the difference between the estimated value of housing consumed and housing costs, which we refer to as net imputed rent. We investigate whether findings about child and pensioner poverty, and judgements about the effectiveness of poverty-reducing policies, are affected by accounting for housing in this way
EUROMOD: the European Union tax-benefit microsimulation model
Full text linkThis paper aims to provide an introduction to the current state of the art of EUROMOD, the European Union tax-benefit microsimulation model. It explains the original motivations for building a multi-country EU-wide model and summarises its current organisation. It provides an overview of EUROMOD components, covering its policy scope, the input data, the validation process and some technical aspects such as the tax-benefit programming language and the user interface. The paper also reviews some recent applications of EUROMOD and, finally, considers future developments
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