Tax Progression in OECD Countries

Overcoming the empirical drawbacks of previous progression studies, this volume analyzes tax progression through Lorenz and Suits curve equivalents, allowing for a valuable comparative assessment of the 13 nations included in the Luxembourg Income Study.

This is the first book that performs international and intertemporal comparisons of uniform tax progression with empirical data. While conventional measures of tax progression suffer from serious disadvantages for empirical analyses, this book extends uniform measures to progression comparisons of countries with different income distributions. Tax progression is analyzed in terms of Lorenz curve and Suits curve equivalents of net incomes and taxes. The authors derive six distinct definitions of the relation "is more progressive than", which are then utilized for an empirical analysis of 13 countries included in the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS). In two thirds of all international comparisons of tax progression, the authors report a clear ranking of the respective countries in terms of progression dominance. Tax based definitions of greater progressivity perform best. These observations are yet reinforced by statistical tests. The book also provides an account of the institutional background of the involved countries in order to facilitate the interpretation of the data. Moreover, the authors conduct intertemporal comparisons of tax progression for selected countries and perform a sensitivity analysis with respect to the parameterization of the equivalence scale.

Describes the details of the OECD tax systems Compares tax progression among 13 OECD countries Investigates changes in tax progression over time in selected OECD countries Includes supplementary material: sn.pub/extras

Inhalt
Introduction: Measuring Tax Progression.- Theories: Local Measures.- Global Measures.- Uniform Measures.- Applications: Data and Fiscal Institutions of the Surveyed Countries.- Numerical Results.- Statistical Tests.- Progression Intensity.