The main objective of this part of the paper is the examination of the redistributive effects on households'incomes of the changes in taxes and benefits implemented in the period of the consolidation of the Italian public budget,from 1985 to 2000. The paper is divided into two main sections. In the first section we develop a model to compute gross of tax and disposable household incomes for a sample of Italian population taken from the 1987 Bank of Italy's Survey of Income and Wealth; then we apply these data to evaluate the distributional impact on annual incomes of some of the main fiscal changes occurred in the last 15 years. In the second section, data from the same source will be used to construct a steady state intertemporal model able to analyse the intragenerational effects on lifetime incomes of the reforms occurred in the same period in the rules governing the pension system and the personal income tax. We will consider only steady state effects of this policies: each individual in the model faces a constant fiscal rule for his/her entire lifetime, both for the pension system and for the personal income tax. The most noticeable result of our estimations is that the consolidation of the Italian public budget in the observed period seems not to have changed the overall distributive impact of the tax-benefit system. We found that the difference between the Gini coefficients before and after the set of policy measures here examined is even slightly greater in 2000 than in 1985. The decomposition of the distributive impact of the tax-benefit system in these two years shows however that during the period there has been a strong decline in the whole progressivity of the system, counterbalanced by an equally relevant increase in the incidence of net taxes. As log as the dynamic model is concerned two main results emerge from the analysis. First, for all deciles of lifetime income the new pension system enacted in the 1992 is much less generous. In our base case, the difference between the present values of contributions and pensions becomes positive, meaning that current and future generations will be called to pay for the implicit debt created by the introduction of the PAYGO system. The second important point is that the contribution-related pension scheme is more neutral in the intragenerational distribution of resources, while the previous system was more favourable for the richest part of the population. The combination of these two findings means that in the future the government should find outside the old-age pension system the resources to sustain the living standards of the lowest part of the distribution.
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Find related papers by JEL classification: I38 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Welfare and Poverty - - - Government Programs; Provision and Effects of Welfare Programs D31 - Microeconomics - - Distribution - - - Personal Income and Wealth Distribution E62 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Macroeconomic Policy, Macroeconomic Aspects of Public Finance, and General Outlook - - - Fiscal Policy
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