H23 - Taxation and Subsidies: Externalities; Redistributive Effects; Environmental Taxes and SubsidiesReturn

This article aims to analyse the distributional impacts of the meal voucher system in the Czech Republic, especially concerning income inequality. It analyses the redistributive effects of meal allowances on various income deciles providing rough estimates of the impact of meal allowance tax exemption on the government budget and simulating several scenarios for the replacement of the current meal allowance scheme with flat meal allowances. We estimate that meal allowance tax relief represents a direct burden of around 11.3 billion Czech korunas for the state budget, although this approximation does not take indirect effects into account and could thus be an overestimate. We provide evidence which suggests that the current form of meal allowances widens the income gap between beneficiaries and non-beneficiaries, within as well as across the income deciles. Affluent households receive meal allowances more frequently, and, moreover, the allowances they receive are both nominally and proportionately higher. According to our simulation using a constant budget of the size of our rough estimate replacing the current meal allowance scheme with a flat meal allowance system would promote income equality. Such a change would benefit the lower deciles, due to a higher share of individuals in these deciles being entitled to meal allowances, while the upper decile households would see a decline in their meal allowances.

The aim of the paper is to examine the progressivity of the pension security in the Czech Republic using an intragenerational longitudinal approach. Since there is no available Czech panel data we modelled pseudo-panel data on lifetime earnings of employees on the basis of real crosssectional data. Then the present values of lifetime contributions paid to and lifetime pensions received from the system were derived from the simulated lifetime earnings. The analysis revealed that the Czech pension security redistributes the funds from the higher-income participants to the lower-income ones and from men to women. Furthermore the Gini coefficients confirmed that the scheme reduces income inequality. The results proved that the solidarity principle built in the pension formula prevails over the benefit principle, which is also present in the formula, when the benefit component is relatively more favourable for the rich employees because of the shape of the lifetime earnings function.

The aim of this paper is to analyse progressivity of value added tax in the Czech Republic under the framework of both annual incidence and lifetime incidence. Moreover, impact of the harmonisation of VAT rates connected with the accession of the Czech Republic to the EU on the income distribution is examined. The burden table serves to show the distribution of the VAT burden among households by income categories; the generalised entropy measures and the Gini coefficient are used for measurement of inequality of income. Results show that the Czech VAT is regressive when annual income is analysed while the lifetime income analysis indicated that VAT is progressive. Furthermore, the results suggest that the distribution of income (annual as well as lifetime) after taxation was more equal before the harmonisation, and that impact of the changes in VAT rates in 2004 was likely larger on the lower-income households.

The literature on the environment shows that imperfect competition in global markets creates a strategic interaction between governments that can lead to the ineficient distortion of environmental taxes. This literature does not consider that workers can set up different organizational structures to set wages. We assume that under decentralized wage setting there is an independent union in each irm while under centralized wage setting there is an industry-wide union that sets the wages of all irms. We show that under a decentralized structure governments choose environmental taxes closer to those which are socially eficient than those chosen under a centralized structure. However, environmental damage is greater in the former case.