EUROPEAN GOVERNMENTS REDISTRIBUTE income among their citizens on a much larger scale than does the U.S. government. European social programs are more generous and reach a larger share of citizens. European tax systems are more progressive. European regulations designed to protect the poor are more intrusive. In this paper we try to understand why. The literature on the size of government is ric...

The potential for trade in health services has expanded rapidly in recent decades. More efficient communication systems have helped to reduce distance-related barriers to trade; rising incomes and enhanced information have increased the mobility of patients; and internal cost pressures have led various governments to consider possibilities for increased private participation. As yet, however, h...

The federal government’s debt has increased dramatically in the past few years, and large annual budget deficits will probably continue indefinitely under current laws or policies. If current laws remain unchanged, deficits will total roughly $7 trillion over the next 10 years, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projects; if certain policies that are scheduled to expire under current law wer...

Although a number of studies have examined the influence of public opinion on government policy, few have considered the influence of public opinion on social conditions. These are separate questions, since government policies may not have their intended effects and opinion may influence some outcomes independently of government action. This paper examines the relationship between public suppor...

We use three conventional inequality indices—the Gini, the coefficient of variation of income, and the relative mean deviation of income—and the Atkinson index to examine the effect of income tax rates, the minimum wage, and all the major government welfare and transfer programs on the evolution of income inequality for rural and urban areas by state from 1981 to 1997. We find that these progra...

BACKGROUND Diabetes is a costly and debilitating disease. The aim of the study is to quantify the individual and national costs of diabetes resulting from people retiring early because of this disease, including lost income; lost income taxation, increased government welfare payments; and reductions in GDP. METHODS A purpose-built microsimulation model, Health&WealthMOD2030, was used to estim...

State governments have traditionally raised revenue from business by taxing corporate income. But in recent years the growing difficulty of administering state corporate income taxes has prompted a search for alternative ways of taxing companies. This search for new business taxes has ironically sparked a resurgence in one of the world’s oldest broad-based tax structures: the gross receipts tax...

Multinational companies can shift profit and income between branches in order to reduce the overall tax liabilities of the company. The result is a tax competition between countries. In this paper we consider the sequential choice of tax rates to illustrate the potential effects of tax leadership. We use a profit shifting model with multinational firms that operate in two countries, large and s...

_______________ 1 For example, states have vastly increased responsibility for welfare legislation. A key provision of the 1996 federal welfare overhaul (The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act) requires each state to provide an annual current estimate of its child poverty rate by May 31st, starting in 1998. If that rate exceeds the previous year’s rate by more than ...

The purpose of this paper is to compare Canadian and US performances with respect to economic growth and inequality. We find that Canada, with little economic growth in the past two decades (in fact, negative in the most recent decade), has had an increase in inequality of market income (in the absence of government taxes and money transfers), but almost no increase in inequality of after-tax i...