Update and Extension of the EUROMOD Wealth Taxation project.

Wealth taxation has been put forward by scholars and policy makers as a way to reduce income inequalities, which have been on the increase over the past decades in many countries. New household surveys such as the Eurosystem Household Finance and Consumption Survey (HFCS) developed by the European Central Bank Eurosystem represent a milestone in the ongoing process to better measure individual well-being. However, distributional analysis of income and wealth requires information on disposable income and wealth which are not available, as the new Eurosystem data includes only gross income values. Moreover, in order to simulate the effects of wealth taxes and (budget neutral) reforms to the current direct taxes a microsimulation model is needed. In order to allow for cross-country coverage and comparability, a European wide tax-benefit microsimulation model like EUROMOD is most appropriate. EUROMOD is a static model that provides measures of direct taxes, social insurance contributions, cash benefits as well as market incomes in a comparable way across countries. The aim of this project is to build further on the pilot project and update and extended the EUROMOD model with HFCS data. For a selection of EU countries, the relevant policy sheets to simulate wealth taxes on tailored input database will be included. This will allow expanding the policy domains currently covered in EUROMOD with dimensions like wealth taxation, which recently gained much prominence, in academics as well as the public debate.

Keywords:EU, WEALTH TAXATION

Disciplines:Applied sociology, Policy and administration, Social psychology, Social stratification, Social theory and sociological methods, Sociology of life course, family and health, Other sociology and anthropology