Fredrick L. Golladay, Robert H. Haveman Economic Impacts of Tax-Transfer Policy

Annotation

The Economic Impacts of Tax-Transfer Policy: Regional and Distributional Effects deals with evaluating proposed income-transfer policies through tax modeling. The book analyzes the direct and indirect effects of two variants of a negative income tax plan. These are the standard negative income tax and the Family Assistance Plan. By studying the indirect effects of income-maintenance programs on industries, occupations, and different regions, the authors point to understanding the effectiveness of alternative income-maintenance programs. Proposed changes in national taxes and transfer policies aim to achieve income redistribution. In their studies and models, the authors noted that the full impact of these tax policies throughout the income spectra covering different income classes, industries, occupations, and regions is different from that gathered from observations involving the direct effects of these schemes. The authors cite some policy implications resulting from their study, such as the redistributional impacts of direct tax-transfer scheme are not as efficient as expected and that increasing the demand for low-skilled workers and improving their job qualities is one way of improving income distribution. The text is valuable for economists and government policymakers in the finance and labor sectors, as well as for sociologists and political economists.