The 2007 Personal Income Tax Reform in Italy: Effects on Potential Equity, Horizontal Inequity and Re-ranking

According to Kakwani and Lambert (1998), an equitable income tax should respect three axioms related to each taxpayer’s tax liability, average tax rate and post-tax income: whenever taxation determines unequal tax treatments among equals or modifies pre-tax ordering, it influences the potential vertical effect of the tax through three types of inequity. Following the authors’ measurement system, we investigate changes in axiom violations due to the 2007 Italian personal income tax reform, that introduced significant changes in the tax structure. Our microsimulation model uses as input data those provided by the Bank of Italy in its Survey on Households Income and Wealth in the year 2006; estimates of the distribution of taxpayers are very close to the Ministry of Finance official statistics. The analysis considers both the individual and equivalent household gross income distribution and evaluates the decomposition with and without surtaxes. Main findings suggest that both in the 2006 and 2007 tax system most of the overall violations concern the axiom demanding the average tax rate to be a non decreasing function with respect to the gross income; the axiom requiring richer taxpayers to pay higher tax liabilities than poorer ones and the axiom requiring the tax to do not introduce re-rankings in the pre-tax income order present minor violations. The 2007 reform enhances both the potential redistributive effect, that is the one that could be obtained without axiom violations, and the axiom violations: the net result is a small positive variation of the actual redistributive effect. These phenomena appear more relevant for taxpayers than those for equivalent households. For what concerns taxpayers, the 2007 reform has modified also the composition of the three axiom violations, that remains almost the same whenever equivalent households are considered. Finally, focusing on each decile of the income distribution, regressivities are concentrated in the bottom five deciles of the income distribution both for taxpayers and equivalent households.Personal Income Tax, Redistributive Effect, Horizontal Inequity, Reranking, Microsimulation Models

The Decomposition of the Redistributive Effect and the Issue of Close Equals Identification

Urban and Lambert (2005, 2008) present an exhaustive summary and an in-depth discussion of the literature contributions about the decomposition of the redistributive effect of a tax (RE). The authors discuss the indexes available in the literature for the potential vertical effect (V), the loss due to horizontal fairness violations (H) and that due to re-rankings (R); they also introduce new indexes specifically conceived to take into account problems arising when groups of exact equals are substituted by groups of close equals. Close equals groups are generally obtained by splitting the pre-tax income distribution into contiguous intervals having the same bandwidth, so that the problem of the bandwidth choice arises. van de Van, Creedy and Lambert (2001) suggest choosing the bandwidth that maximizes the potential vertical effect V. Even looking for V maximization, we discuss a new criterion that yields a compromise between the contrasting needs of minimizing the effects of pre-tax within groups inequalities and the minimization of group average re-rankings. The criterion is then applied to evaluate the components of two decompositions: the former is the one suggested by Urban and Lambert (2005, 2008) as preferable, the latter is suggested by us on the basis of Urban and Lambert’s paving discussion. According to our simulation results, when comparing different income tax systems for a same population as well as adopting the “optimal” bandwidth, the new criterion seems to introduce lower approximation errors than the maximization of V.Income Tax, Redistributive Effect, Horizontal Inequity, Re-ranking

The treatment of intertrochanteric fracture: a survey on the preferred treatment used by orthopedic surgeons in Campania

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Computer-Aided Rehabilitation Supported by Zygomatic Implants: A Cohort Study Comparing Atrophic with Oncologic Patients after Five Years of Follow-Up

The aim of this study was to evaluate the survival and clinical success rate, complications, and patients’ quality of life after computer-aided rehabilitation supported by zygomatic implants in cases of severe maxillary atrophy (ten patients) and in bone defects in oncologic patients (ten patients). All patients underwent computer-aided planning and surgery. Seventy-three zygomatic implants were placed. The mean follow-up period was 39.9 months. Implant survival and clinical success rate, the effectiveness of planning the implant length, biological and prosthetic complications, and the quality of life were evaluated. The five-year implant survival rate for patients with maxillary atrophy and oncologic patients was 97.4% and 96.7%, respectively. The prosthetic survival rate was 100%. Two implant failures occurred in the first year. One implant failure was observed in each group. Minor biological and prosthetic complications occurred in both groups without significant differences. All complications were managed without affecting the treatment. The quality of life increased by 71.3% in the atrophic group and by 82.9% in the oncologic group. Zygomatic implant rehabilitation seems to be a reliable technique for patients with maxillary atrophy and for oncologic patients. The three-dimensional computer-aided approach allows the surgeon to plan the surgery and increase its predictability. Early prosthesis loading certainly allows for better functional outcomes

Common variants at 21q22.3 locus influence MX1 and TMPRSS2 gene expression and susceptibility to severe COVID-19

The established risk factors of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) are advanced age, male sex and comorbidities, but they do not fully explain the wide spectrum of disease manifestations. Genetic factors implicated in the host antiviral response provide for novel insights into its pathogenesis. We performed an in-depth genetic analysis of chromosome 21 exploiting the genome-wide association study data, including 6,406 individuals hospitalized for COVID-19 and 902,088 controls with European genetic ancestry from the COVID-19 Host Genetics Initiative. We found that five single nucleotide polymorphisms within TMPRSS2 and near MX1 gene show associations with severe COVID-19. The minor alleles of the five SNPs correlated with a reduced risk of developing severe COVID-19 and high level of MX1 expression in blood. Our findings demonstrate that host genetic factors can influence the different clinical presentations of COVID-19 and that MX1 could be a potential therapeutic target

On determining “close equals groups” in decomposing redistributive and reranking effects

Recently van De Van, Creedy and Lambert (2001) and Urban and Lambert (2008) have reconsidered the original Aronson, Johnson and Lambert (1994) decomposition of the redistributive effect in order to identify the optimal bandwidth that should be used in decomposing the redistributive effect when groups with close pre-tax incomes are considered. The methodology proposed by van De Van, Creedy and Lambert (2001) suggests choosing as the optimal bandwidth the one which maximizes the ratio between the potential effect V (which depends on the bandwidth) and the actual redistributive effect RE (which is invariant). Urban and Lambert (2008) discuss a set of further possible decompositions of the redistributive effect together with a decomposition of the Atkinson-Plotnick-Kakwani index into three terms. In this paper we want to throw some more light on the behavior of three of the main decompositions analyzed by Urban and Lambert (2008) in order to look for criteria to choose a bandwidth which allows the three different definitions of potential redistributive effect to be assumed as coherent as possible values and, in the meanwhile, to catch as much as possible of the potential vertical effect. We suggest looking for the bandwidth where the ratio between the maximum distance among the different potential vertical effect definitions and the minimum among the different potential vertical effects is minimum.Personal Income Tax, Redistributive Effect, Horizontal Inequity, Reranking,