Redistributive Effect And Progressivity Of Taxes An International Comparison Across The EU Using EUROMOD

This paper gives an international comparison of the redistributive effect of personal income taxes in the 15 countries of the EU, using the European tax-benefit model EUROMOD. We focus on the effect of personal income taxes, social insurance contributions and other direct taxes. We present the contribution of progressivity and average tax rate to the reduction of income inequality, as well as the weight of the various types of tax concessions (i.e. exemptions, deductions, allowances and credits). There appears to be a wide variety among countries in the level of inequality reduction as well as in the instruments used to achieve this reduction. Personal income taxes are in all countries the most important source for inequality reduction, which is to a large extent, though not solely, due to the progressive rate schedule. Countries with a high degree of pre-tax inequality do not systematically redistribute more through their taxes; the results indicate rather the opposite.European Union, microsimulation, income redistribution, income taxes, social insurance contributions

Design of weak 1-D bragg grating filters in SOI waveguides using volume holography techniques

To answer the growing need for more versatile integrated spectral filters, we show that weak one-dimensional gratings can be designed towards any desired target spectrum. We follow a very straightforward design procedure to demonstrate the performance of these devices. Measurements and simulations show a very good correspondence with the target spectra. By analyzing the results, we also found that the design procedure can be refined by using simulated reflections, instead of relying on the calculated Fresnel reflections

Combating In-Work Poverty in Continental Europe: An Investigation Using the Belgian Case

Recent studies find in-work poverty to be a pan-European phenomenon. Yet in-work poverty has come to the fore as a policy issue only recently in most continental European countries. Policies implemented in the United States and the United Kingdom, most notably in-work benefit schemes, are much discussed. This article argues that if it comes to preventing and alleviating poverty among workers, both the policy options and constraints facing Continental European policymakers are fundamentally different from those facing Anglo-Saxon policymakers. Consequently, policies that work in one setting cannot be simply emulated elsewhere. We present micro-simulation derived results for Belgium to illustrate some of these points. Policy options discussed and simulated include: higher minimum wages, reductions in employee social security contributions, tax relief for low-paid workers, and the implementation of a stylised version of the British Working Tax Credit. The latter measure has the strongest impact on in-work poverty but in settings where wages are compressed, as in Belgium, a severe trade-off between coverage and budgetary cost presents itself. The article concludes that looking beyond targeted measures to universal benefits and support for employment of carers may be important components of an overall policy package to tackle in-work poverty.negative income taxes, in-work poverty, low pay, in-work benefits

A care time benefit as a timely alternative for the non-working spouse compensation in the Belgian tax system

Over the past decades, the growing labour force participation of mothers has rendered the Belgian personal income tax system increasingly outdated. Especially the ‘marital quotient’ system - that allows spouses with monetary income to transfer part of their tax base to a spouse without monetary income - is no longer a tax allowance that compensates childcare efforts. It rather has become a subsidy to older cohorts for their past childcare efforts. As an alternative, we model in this article a system that is geared towards the effective care trajectories of nowadays parents. We thereby follow earlier ideas of Hilde Bojer, Patricia Apps and Ray Rees to reflect care efforts in the tax base of individuals. Following Bojer, we propose a system that incorporates a socially grounded amount of childcare time in household income, and simulate this with the Belgian microsimulation model MISIM. The amount relates to the number and age of children and can either be procured through childcare services or self-provision. In the proposed system both market- and self-provided care result in a similar ubsidy. We elaborate a monetary estimate of self-provided childcare on the basis of the detailed information of time use in the Flemish Family and Care Survey (2004-2005). For discussion we provide an overview of potential drawbacks and advantages and evaluate the redistributive impact of the simulated alternative.ground, childcare, tax system, static simulation

Retroreflective optical marker chips for simultaneous identification and localization

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Comments on "Translation-invariant bipolarons and the problem of high-temperature superconductivity"

We comment on the recent results of Refs. [1, 2] on the bipolaron problem derived using an approximation of Gross - Tulub. It is proved that, contrary to the claim made in Refs. [1, 2], the bipolaron ground state energy calculated there in the strong-coupling approximation has not been shown to constitute a variational upper bound.Comment: 3 pages, 2 figures, submitted to Solid State Communication