Departing from the welfarist tradition, recent theories of justice focus on individual opportunities as the appropriate standard for distributive judgments. To explore how this philosophical conception can be translated into concrete public policy,we select the income as relevant outcome and the income tax as the relevant redistributive policy, and we address the following questions: (i) what is the degree of opportunity inequality in an income distribution? (ii) how to design an opportunity egalitarian income tax policy? Several criteria for ranking income distributions on the basis of equality of opportunities are derived. Moreover, we characterize an opportunity egalitarian income tax and we formulate criteria for choosing among alternative tax schedules.
Measuring and implementing equality of opportunity for income
PERAGINE, Vitorocco
2004-01-01
Abstract
Departing from the welfarist tradition, recent theories of justice focus on individual opportunities as the appropriate standard for distributive judgments. To explore how this philosophical conception can be translated into concrete public policy,we select the income as relevant outcome and the income tax as the relevant redistributive policy, and we address the following questions: (i) what is the degree of opportunity inequality in an income distribution? (ii) how to design an opportunity egalitarian income tax policy? Several criteria for ranking income distributions on the basis of equality of opportunities are derived. Moreover, we characterize an opportunity egalitarian income tax and we formulate criteria for choosing among alternative tax schedules.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
