Comparing redistributive efficiency of tax-benefit systems in Europe

In empirical analysis, the Kakwani index is the most frequently used indicator for comparing progressivity across countries and over time. The Kakwani is often assumed to measure to what extent a policy design is targeted to the poor. It has, however, a major drawback: it is not defined for net tax incidence—that is, the whole system of taxes and benefits. Moreover, it is defined over different intervals for different pre-tax income distributions and different average tax rates. This paper proposes an extension to Kakwani index based on the concept of relative redistributive efficiency that is not affected by these drawbacks. The Redistributive Efficiency index was compared to the Kakwani index for taxes/benefits in EU countries by using Euromod baselines. In addition, the Redistributive Efficiency index was computed on the whole tax-benefit system; that is, taxes and benefits were evaluated together. Only Ireland and the UK combine high levels of redistributive efficiency with a relevant amount of tax revenues and social expenditures. They obviously obtain very high redistribution, above 15 points. Most of the countries considered show an intermediate level of redistribution (between 7 and 12 points), but with a different mix. A group of Central and Northern European countries plus Slovenia and Hungary combine medium levels of redistributive efficiency and medium size, while some Southern European countries (Spain and Portugal) and new members compensate a rather low amount of transfer and taxes with quite high levels of efficiency. The remaining new member states and Southern EU countries show a very low level of redistribution, below 7 points. Interestingly, they vary in the level of tax burden and of resources devoted to benefits but all of them show a poor Redistributive Efficiency. This suggests that low Redistributive Efficiency plays a key role in explaining why certain countries perform a limited amount of redistribution

Pension Incomes in the European Union: Policy Reform Strategies in Comparative Perspective

This paper considers the effects on current pensioner incomes of reforms designed to improve the long-term sustainability of public pension systems in the European Union. We use EUROMOD to simulate a set of common illustrative reforms for four countries selected on the basis of their diverse pension systems and patterns of poverty among the elderly: Denmark, Germany, Italy and the UK. The variations in fiscal and distributive effects on the one hand suggest that different paths for reform are necessary in order to achieve common objectives across countries, and on the other provide indications of the appropriate directions for reform in each case.Pensions; European Union; Microsimulation

THE GENDER CONTRIBUTION TO THE CORPORATE GOVERNANCE AND THE CORPORATE PERFORMANCE (LESSONS FROM THE E.U.)

We investigate whether gender can be considered as part of the corporate governance structure, and accordingly its real impact on corporate performance. Based on our analysis of 21,382 European companies and 2,159 ones in the UK, we focus on the impact of mandatory female percentages, (pink-quotas), based on the proposed EU-Directive, which aims to push female representation toward their natural percentage of the home population. We find that gender explains differences among the corporate governance solutions as adopted at national level. This fact holds regardless of whether the specific country has already adopted any regulation in accordance with the EU proposal. In fact, governance choices are more rooted into the country culture, although the single national governance schemes differentiate whether the managerial roles are mainly covered by females or males. The EU-Directive appears to be unable to reduce the gaps between the schemes of governance adopted across the EU, as there is no economic incentive to do. Indeed, gender and governance do contribute to capital intensity of EU-Companies and their funding, only, as suggested by previous literature but has no impact on corporate ROI or its persistence. Surprisingly far from it, we find out that female gender attracts more equity capital, regardless of the operating risk level. However, there is evidence that in the unregulated UK market, gender does influence ROI

DOES INEQUALITY HARM DEMOCRACY? AN EMPIRICAL INVESTIGATION ON THE UK

This paper presents an empirical investigation about the effect of increasing economic inequality on some aspects of the quality of a democracy. The main novelty of the paper lies in its methodology: it applies to a single country - the UK – in a long run perspective. Using Eurobarometer data for the period 1974-2009, we select three questions and check whether an increase in inequality alters the answers to these questions, subject to other control variables. In particular, as indicators of the quality of democracy, we select the degree of Democracy-Satisfaction, the frequency of Political Discussion and Participation in Election. Another novelty is the use of several measures of inequality: the Gini coefficient, the Foster-Wolfson polarization index, the interdecile ratios P90/P10 and P90/P50, the shares of top and bottom 1%, 5% and 10% income. Inequality indices have been computed using two British household budget/expenditure surveys, i.e. the Family Expenditure Survey and the Family Resources Survey. Using an array of indicators allows us to disentangle what happens in the different parts of the income distribution and to avoid the dependence of the results on the choice of the indicator. The estimation is carried out estimating probit and ordered probit models. The main finding is that higher level of income inequality, no matter how it is measured, impacts negatively on citizens’ satisfaction with democracy and positively on their political discussion and intention to vote. This leads to the issue of limiting inequality as an engine of deterioration in the quality of democracy, and sustaining an active citizenship

Distributional implications of income tax evasion in Greece, Hungary and Italy

Even though tax evasion has been the focus of a growing volume of research in recent years, the issue of its distributional impact is still relatively neglected. This paper is an attempt to analyse empirically the implications of tax evasion in terms of inequality, poverty, redistribution and progressivity of the income tax system in Greece, Hungary and Italy (three countries featuring an extensive informal economy). The paper applies the discrepancy method, i.e. compares two sets of data, household budget surveys and income tax returns, to derive ratios of under-reporting by income source and geographical area. The tax-benefit model EUROMOD is used to estimate the distributional impact of tax evasion comparing household disposable incomes to a full compliance counterfactual.tax evasion; inequality; microsimulation

Catch the Heterogeneity: The New Bank-Tailored Integrated Rating

The purpose of this article is to develop a bank-oriented rating approach, tailored by incorporating the various heterogeneity dimensions characterizing financial institutions, named “Bank-Tailored Integrated Rating” (BTIR). BTIR is able to catch the financial cycle, including the pandemic crisis, and the ongoing change in banking normative from a microeconomic perspective, and it is inherently coherent with the challenging frontier of forecasting tail risk in financial markets in similar ways as in De Nicolò and Lucchetta (2017), although their approach is macroeconomic) since it considers the downside risk in the theoretical framework. The method employed was an innovative integrated rating (IR) statistical and econometrical panel pre-selection analysis that takes into account the characteristics of risk and the greater heterogeneity of the banks. The result is a challenge rating procedure delivering forward-looking preselection requested by the new International Financial Reporting Standard (IFRS-9). The future direction is extremely promising given the increase in idiosyncratic and systemic risks in financial markets.The purpose of this article is to develop a bank-oriented rating approach, tailored by incorporating the various heterogeneity dimensions characterizing financial institutions, named "Bank-Tailored Integrated Rating" (BTIR). BTIR is able to catch the financial cycle, including the pandemic crisis, and the ongoing change in banking normative from a microeconomic perspective, and it is inherently coherent with the challenging frontier of forecasting tail risk in financial markets in similar ways as in De Nicole and Lucchetta (2017), although their approach is macroeconomic) since it considers the downside risk in the theoretical framework. The method employed was an innovative integrated rating (IR) statistical and econometrical panel pre-selection analysis that takes into account the characteristics of risk and the greater heterogeneity of the banks. The result is a challenge rating procedure delivering forward-looking preselection requested by the new International Financial Reporting Standard (IFRS-9). The future direction is extremely promising given the increase in idiosyncratic and systemic risks in financial markets

Household Incomes and Redistribution in the European Union: Quantifying the Equalising Properties of Taxes and Benefits

The systems of direct taxes and cash benefits in the Member States of the European Union vary considerably in size and structure. We explore their direct impacts on cross-sectional income inequality (termed "redistributive effect" for the purpose of this paper) using EUROMOD, a tax-benefit microsimulation model for the European Union. This relies on harmonised household micro-data representative of each national population together with simulations of entitlements to cash benefits and liabilities for taxes and social contributions. It allows us to draw a more comprehensive – and comparable – picture of the combined effects of transfers and taxes than is usually possible. We decompose the redistributive effect of taxbenefit systems to assess and compare the effectiveness of individual policies at reducing income disparities. We derive results for the 15 "old" members of the European Union and present them for each country separately as well as for the EU-15 as a whole.Income inequality, Redistribution, Microsimulation, European Union

Role of Metalloproteases in the Release of the IL-1 type II Decoy Receptor

The IL-1 type II receptor (decoy RII) is a nonsignaling molecule the only established function of which is to capture IL-1 and prevent it from interacting with signaling receptor. The decoy RII is released in a regulated way from the cell surface. Here, we reported that hydroxamic acid inhibitors of matrix metalloproteases inhibit different pathways of decoy RII release, including the following: (a) the slow (18 h) gene expression-dependent release from monocytes and polymorphonuclear cells exposed to dexamethasone; (b) rapid release (minutes) from myelomonocytic cells exposed to tumor necrosis factor, chemoattractants, or phorbol myristate acetate; (c) phorbol myristate acetate-induced release from decoy RII-transfected fibroblasts and B cells. Inhibition of release was associated with increased surface expression of decoy RII. Inhibitors of other protease classes did not substantially affect release. However, serine protease inhibitors increased the molecular mass of the decoy RII released from polymorphonuclear cells from 45 to 60 kDa. Thus, irrespective of the pathway responsible for release and of the cellular context, matrix metalloproteases, rather than differential splicing, play a key role in production of soluble decoy RII

a forgotten italian physicist at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the sicilian giovanni silio borremans

We are presenting the scientific work of Giovanni Silio Borremans (1756-1830), a physicist almost unknown to Science historians, who worked in the city of Caltagirone (Sicily) from 1775 until his death, in 1830. An intense archival work has been carried out on this interesting scientist; it has allowed us to discover many unpublished and unknown documents that have shed a new light on Silio's life and on his scientific activity. As visual evidence, a good number of archive images have been inserted in the text. We owe to Silio the origins of experimental physics in Caltagirone, whose good results will be appreciated after his death by his most illustrious scholar, the physicist and naturalist Emmanuello Taranto Rosso. Silio's work started in Caltagirone in 1775 when a teaching chair in experimental physics was established at the ancient R. Academy Ferdinando IV; he held it for more than fifty years. Some manuscripts, scientific works and the dictated lessons of this learned and erudite man were found and transcribed by his most famous student, the already mentioned Taranto Rosso, who later will, become his "natural" successor in the teaching of experimental Physic at the Academy

Landslide susceptibility analysis exploiting Persistent Scatterers data in the northern coast of Malta

During the last decade a pressing need for more adequate tools to manage the considerable increasing number of hydrogeological emergencies arose among land planning and civil protection authorities. As a consequence, both development and testing of different qualitative and quantitative methods for landslide displacements detection become fundamental in order to provide the best analysis performance in terms of cost-benefit and scientific reliability. Lately quantitative methods to measure deformations of unstable slopes had great advances. In this context, remotely sensed radar techniques, such as PSI (Persistent Scatterers Interferometry), can assist traditional landslide investigations in assessing ground and infrastructure deformations caused by large landslides. The main purpose of this study is exploiting the results of PSI analysis conducted over the Island of Malta to train a Bayesan model for evaluating active landslide susceptibility. This approach has been applied in the NW coast of Malta, where outstanding coastal landslides, such as rock spreads and block slides, have been recognized and mapped. The outcomes of the statistical analysis have been validated through specific field check and GNSS measurements. The results show that the developed susceptibility model predicts an acceptable percentage of landslides and can be considered reliable even if in areas without PSI data