Assessing the Impact of Tax/Transfer Policy Changes on Poverty: Methodological Issues and Some European Evidence

A method of systematically assessing the “first-round” impact of tax and transfer policy changes on the income distribution and the incidence of relative income poverty is proposed. It involves the construction of a “distributionally neutral” policy, which can be approximated by a policy that indexes tax allowances, credits and bands and welfare payment rates in line with a broad measure of income growth. The impact of actual policy changes in five EU countries over the 1998–2001 period is then measured against this benchmark, using the EUROMOD tax-benefit model.