Taxes,Transfers and Income Distribution in Chile

Abstract

This paper seeks to measure the distributive impact of fiscal interventions in Chile,applyingthe “Commitmentto Equity”(CEQ) methodology,astandardized fiscal incidence analysis.As a method-ological innovation ,we incorporated income accrued and not received by Chilean taxpayers through their companies and corporations into the distribution of pre-fiscal income .We find that the differ-ence between the distribution of accrued and received income turns out to be important,around 6 Gini percentage points for each main concept of income .In addition, when moving from the distri- bution of market income to the distribution of final income (after taxes and transfers)the distribution of income improves by 7 Gini percentage points.To assign the improvement in the distribution of in- come between the different fiscal interventions, we apply the Shapley value and it is observed that half of the improvement in the distribution of income is due to transfers in education, while direct taxes on ly explain 20% of the reduction of the Gini coefficient. Finally,based on the simulation of the impact of the 2014 tax reform carried out by the World Bank, we estimate that the reform would produce an additional reduction of 2.4 Gini percentage points when going from market income to final income.