engleski

Couples, gender and inequality: the case of Croatia

Income inequality, a topic of high interest, is usually assessed on household level. This paper contributes to a better understanding of the redistributive effects of the overall tax – benefit system with an analysis of households on an individual level, within couples. The aim of this paper is to explore the effects of the Croatian system of taxes and benefits on income inequality within couples. The analysis relates to working age couples (with and without children) and is based on data from the EU SILC survey, the microsimulation model EUROMOD being used. The analysis is based on who contributes more to income within the household, i.e. female or male and to what extent the tax-benefit policies overall and by groups mitigate (or aggravate) inequalities between partners. Differences between the pre-fiscal and the post- fiscal income shares of the partners in total household income are compared. If a post-fiscal difference between income shares is lower than the pre-fiscal, then the tax-benefit system has a positive income redistribution. The measure of this impact is the difference between the post-fiscal and pre-fiscal income share of the partner with the lower income, which is expected to be positive to reflect a positive redistribution. The results reveal that the Croatian tax-benefit system proves to have, in general, a positive relative income redistribution, with the strongest effect on households with lower incomes. Of the components of the tax-benefit system, social benefits are the most redistributive. From the gender perspective, the redistribution is larger for male breadwinner couples than it is for female breadwinner couples.

intra-household inequality ; gender ; microsimulations ; tax-benefit system ; EUROMOD

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