Personal Income Tax Progressivity: Trends and Implications

Download or read book Personal Income Tax Progressivity: Trends and Implications written by Claudia Gerber and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 2018-11-20 with total page 24 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This paper discusses how the structure of the tax system affects its progressivity. It suggests a measure of progressive capacity of tax systems, based on the Kakwani index, but independent of pre-tax income distributions. Using this and other progressivity measures, the paper (i) documents a decline in progressivity over the last decades and (ii) examines the relationship between progressivity and economic growth. Regressions do not reveal a significant impact of progressivity on growth, suggesting that efficiency costs of progressivity may be small—at least for degrees of progressivity observed in the sample.