New Economics Papers
on Public Finance
Issue of 2008‒07‒30
two papers chosen by



  1. Tax-benefit revealed social preferences By François Bourguignon; Amedeo Spadaro
  2. Optimal taxation, social contract and the four worlds of welfare capitalism By Amedeo Spadaro

  1. By: François Bourguignon; Amedeo Spadaro
    Abstract: This paper inverts the usual logic of applied optimal income taxation. It starts from the observed distribution of income before and after redistribution and corresponding marginal tax rates. Under a set of simplifying assumptions, it is then possible to recover the social welfare function that would make the observed marginal tax rate schedule optimal. In this framework, the issue of the optimality of an existing tax-benefit system is transformed into the issue of the shape of the social welfare function associated with that system and whether it satisfies elementary properties. This method is applied to the French redistribution system with the interesting implication that the French redistribution authority may appear, under some plausible scenario concerning the size of the labor supply behavioral reactions, non Paretian (e.g. giving negative marginal social weights to the richest class of tax payers).
    Date: 2008
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pse:psecon:2008-37&r=pub
  2. By: Amedeo Spadaro
    Abstract: Drawing from the formal setting of the optimal tax theory (Mirrlees 1971), the paper identifies the level of Rawlsianism of some European social planners starting from the observation of real data and redistribution systems and uses it to build a metric that allows measuring the degree of (dis)similarity of the redistribution systems analyzed. It must be considered as a contribution to the comparative research on the structure and typology of the Welfare State. In particular we consider the optimal taxation model that combines both intensive and extensive margins of labor supply, as suggested by Saez (2002) in order to assess the degree of decommodification of seven European welfare systems. We recover the shape of the social welfare function implicit in tax-benefit systems by inverting the model on actual effective tax rates, as if existing systems were optimal according to some Mirrleesian social planner. Actual distributions of incomes before and after redistribution are obtained using a pan-European tax-benefit microsimulation model. Results are discussed in the light of standard classifications of welfare regimes in Europe. There appears to be a clear coincidence of high decommodification willingness and high Rawlsianism in the Scandinavian, social-democratically influenced welfare states (Denmark). There is an equally clear coincidence of low decommodification willingness and utilitarianism in the <i>Anglo-Saxon liberal</i> model (UK) and in the <i>Southern European</i> welfare states (Italy and Spain). Finally, the <i>Continental European</i> countries (Finland, Germany and France) group closely together in the middle of the scale, as corporatist and etatist.
    Date: 2008
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pse:psecon:2008-38&r=pub

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