Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
  • Publication
    Poverty-Reducing Directions of Indirect Marginal Tax Reforms in Ireland
    (University College Dublin. School of Economics, 2012-12)
    The composition of tax revenue in Ireland had changed dramatically over the past decade, with indirect taxes accounting for a large share of total tax revenue. This shift towards indirect taxation more than direct taxation tends to put excessive burden on the poor, thereby raising the concern about equity implications of the Irish indirect tax systems. In this paper, we utilize Consumption Dominance curve techniques to analyse the impact of marginal indirect tax changes on poverty in Ireland , using the Irish Household Budget Survey data of 1999 and 2005 periods. Using this technique, which is based on the theory of stochastic dominance, we examined the pairwise comparison of different combinations of commodities for both the overall population and the subgroups of population. The technique helps us to identify the directions of indirect marginal tax changes which will reduce poverty for some selected commodities over a broad class of poverty measures and poverty lines.
      222
  • Publication
    Growth and Income Redistribution Components of Changes in Poverty: A Decomposition Analysis for Ireland, 1987-2005
    (University College Dublin. School of Economics, 2012-12)
    This study analysed the contribution of economic growth and redistribution components to aggregate poverty changes in Ireland from 1987-2005, using the Shapley value decomposition approach. The analysis used the household disposable income data from the Household Budget Survey to calculate poverty indices. The result of the Shapley value decomposition of poverty changes into growth and redistribution components revealed that the growth component dominates the redistribution component in bringing about the decline in poverty. This suggests that the drastic fall in absolute poverty over the survey period could be attributed to the increase in the household mean income rather than the redistributive policies of government transfer and income tax systems. We also investigated the extent to which economic growth experienced over the survey period has been pro-poor, by using the Growth Incidence Curve proposed by Ravallion and Chen (2003). It was found that economic growth was slightly pro-poor between 1987 and 1994 and generally anti-poor between 1994 and 1999.
      367