Governments use tax expenditures to boost investment, innovation and employment. However, these schemes are largely opaque, costly and often ineffective in reaching their stated goals. They also frequently trigger unwanted side effects. In order to improve the performance of these tools, the authors present three concrete policy proposals: First, governments should increase transparency on tax benefits. G20 members should take the lead on this with frequent and comprehensive tax expenditure reports. Second, G20 governments should improve the design of tax incentives with the aim of minimizing the generation of windfall profits and negative spillover effects within and across (in particular, on poorer) countries. Third, governments should phase out tax expenditures that are environmentally harmful, including tax incentives for fossil fuels and other schemes that promote an unsustainable use of natural resources.
Kakwani and Reynolds–Smolensky indices are used in the literature to measure the progressivity and redistributive capacity of taxes. These indices may, however, show some limits when used to make normative assessments about non‐revenue neutral tax reforms. Two approaches have traditionally been taken to overcome this problem. The first of these consists of comparing after‐tax income distributions through generalized Lorenz (concentration) curves. The second approach is based on the decomposition of changes in the Reynolds–Smolensky index into changes in the average tax rate and variations in progressivity. Nonetheless, this decomposition between the average tax rate and progressivity may be further exploited to obtain some information that can be relevant to assess tax reforms. The main aim of this study is to draw up some indicators that can be useful to quantify the effects of non‐revenue neutral tax reforms. These indicators are used to investigate the last personal income tax reforms that have taken place in Spain.
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