Politiques familiales et individualisation des droits sociaux. Le cas de limpôt sur le revenu français

There is a general agreement that, like in Scandinavian countries, French family policies are active, legitimate and tend to provide high care services for children. Considering Scandinavian patterns based on individualised rights, French family policies show many specificities. Moreover, they are based on derived rights criticized, because they are supposed to have adverse effects on the promotion of gender equality. In particular, French income tax is largely criticized because of the presence of family quotient in income tax. A great number of articles proposed to replace joint taxation by independent taxation system. The paper shows the limits of this argumentation: first, it is based on neoclassical hypotheses ignoring that married women labour market participation may be the result of decision making within households; second, European tax systems are not simply individual or joint taxation systems but a combination of different tax instruments; third, it underestimates the negative consequences of this transformation on tax equity. Finally, the paper shows that French income tax must be considered as a whole, because it compounds a great number of tax expenditures affecting women choices in labour market participation.