Objective
Income is widely agreed amongst academics, policy-makers and the general public to be a crucial indicator of personal economic well-being. Information about its distribution is a vital input to analysis of levels and trends in overall living standards, poverty and inequality. Information about its redistribution through government policies income taxation and social security benefits in particular is important for assessing public interventions designed to improve equity and social justice, and for providing a counterpoint to information about changing incentives, efficiency and growth.
We propose the development of appropriate social indicators which link monitoring of policy instruments such as income taxation and social benefit systems with social outcomes in terms of living standards. These indicators are especially relevant to the assessment of social integration and exclusion, both within and between countries of the union, and also trends over time. The work linking the structure of the tax and benefit system to these social indicators does, of course, provide an important link between the instruments of policy and the social outcomes of interest for the European Community.
A key concern of the overall project is the interaction between developments in analytical methods and their practical applications and policy relevance. The theoretical part of the project will concentrate on three issues, introducing new methods of analysis:
(i) the reexamination of the fundamentals of inequality measurement. (ii) the implications for inequality measurement and tax design ofdifferences in households composition, and
(iii)the analysis of the distribution and redistribution in a dynamicframework. The applied research also addresses these issues
and more generally provides improved techniques for income datahandling and statistical analysis. These methods in turn areused to provide new empirical insights about policy outcomes withinand across European countries using both national and internationalmicro-data sets.
The Network would contribute to scientific appraisal and policyrecommendation by expanding the group of social scientists who haveexpertise in carrying out analyses of the distributional impact of taxpolicy and more generally of government intervention in the economy. .
We shall provide doctoral and post-doctoral research experience and training on the research topics detailed above in the application, leading to substantive contributions to Network research output. To this end, we propose hiring 13.5 full-time researchers or equivalently 162 man-months (as indicated below) to work with the associated contractors. The different institutions involved in the Network have appropriate experience and expertise in hosting research such as proposed. In addition, the large international graduate programmes of study at the LSE (Cowell), Essex (Jenkins) and the GREQAM (Davidson) provide large pools of potential researchers able to be hired and trained under the Network's auspices. The Summer School funded by the HCM programme and chaired by Davidson in Marseille offers training possibilities for EU Ph.D students. The establishment in Marseille of the IDEP (a new research centre specialised in public economics and partly funded by the EU) would provide a suitable environment for research and training in the next few years. We shall organise a workshop on a yearly basis where participants can present work in progress and discuss their results. We also want to offer participants the possibility of visiting colleagues to promote joint research across countries and expertise sharing. Seminars, more intended to younger researchers, will be arranged twice a year by the different teams constituting the network.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
- social scienceseconomics and businesseconomics
- social sciencessociologygovernancetaxation
- social scienceslawhuman rights
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Call for proposal
Data not availableFunding Scheme
NET - Research network contractsCoordinator
33608 Pessac
France