Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/96274 
Year of Publication: 
2014
Series/Report no.: 
EUROMOD Working Paper No. EM3/14
Publisher: 
University of Essex, Institute for Social and Economic Research (ISER), Colchester
Abstract: 
The Australian income tax and transfer system has undergone considerable reform since the mid 1980s. As a number of commentators have pointed out, one impact of reforms to cash transfers for families, as well as of some reforms to direct taxes, has been the evolution of a defacto system of family taxation, with negative consequences, in terms of incentives to earn (and consequent deadweight loss), for parents, and especially for secondary earners in couple families with children. In this paper, we use a new Australian microsimulation model, ATM, built on the EUROMOD platform to examine the extent to which policies to support families with children through the tax and transfer system have been achieved at the expense of gender equity, and how the system could be better designed to achieve child poverty reduction with gender equity. Our analysis suggests that the institution of a universal family payment that would both improve incentives and reduce child poverty is potentially affordable, even before reduction of deadweight loss under the current system is taken in to account. However, such reforms as are modelled here would be politically difficult, since the main gainers would be families with children in the top half of the income distribution, and the main losers would be taxpayers who do not have dependent children.
Subjects: 
family payments
income tax
redistribution
effective marginal tax rates
Australia
microsimulation
JEL: 
D31
H55
I38
H24
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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