-We develop and estimate a microeconometric model of household labour supply in four European countries with differing economies and welfare policy regimes: Denmark, Italy, Portugal and the United Kingdom. We then simulate, under the constraint of constant total net-tax revenue (fiscal neutrality), the effects of various hypothetical tax-transfer-reform basic-income policies: Guaranteed * This work is part of a CHILD (Centre for Household, Income, Labour and Demographic Economics, www.child-centre.it) project. Colombino, project coordinator, developed the microeconometric model and is responsible for the interpretations and opinions expressed. O'Donoghue created datasets for the microeconometric model and performed initial experiments. Narazani and Locatelli worked on datasets and the initial estimation exercises. Narazani performed the recent estimations and simulations. We thank Isilda Shima (at the European Centre for Social Welfare Policy and Research) who contributed under a research contract with the Department of Economics of Turin. We thank two anonymous referees for helpful comments.Copyright ©2010 The Berkeley Electronic Press. All rights reserved.Minimum Income, Work Fare, Participation Basic Income and Universal Basic Income. We produce indexes and criteria by which the reforms can be ranked and compared to current tax-transfer systems. The exercise can be considered as one of empirical optimal taxation, where the optimization problem is solved computationally rather than analytically. Many versions of basic income policies would be superior to the current system, and the most successful are not meanstested (Universal or Participation Basic Income) and adopt progressive tax rules. If constraints other than fiscal neutrality are considered, such as the implied top marginal tax rate or the effect on female labour supply, the picture changes: unconditional policies remain optimal and feasible in Denmark and the United Kingdom; while in Italy and Portugal universal policies appear instead to be too costly in implied top marginal tax rates and adverse effects on female participationconditional policies such as Work Fare emerge as more desirable there.

The adoption of flat tax systems in Central and Eastern European countries have often been supported by arguments of simplicity, higher compliance and lower distortionary effects. However, since income inequality is high in these countries, the question of introducing some progressivity has come to the fore in both policy and academic circles. In this paper, we combine microsimulation and macro models to analyze the effects of moving from a flat to a progressive tax system and we find that a reduction in income inequality can be achieved with positive, albeit negligible, employment and growth impact.

It is widely recognized that childcare has important pedagogical, economic and social effects on both children and parents. This paper is the first attempt to estimate a joint structural model of female labour supply and childcare behaviour applied to Italy in order to analyse the effects of relaxing the existing constraints in terms of childcare availability and costs by considering public, private and informal childcare. Results suggest that Italian households might alter their childcare and labour supply behaviours substantially if the coverage rate of formal childcare increases to reach the European targets. Overall, increasing child care coverage is estimated to be more effective in enhancing labour incentives than decreasing existing child care costs, at the same budgetary cost.

The objective of this paper is to forecast the size and effects of remittances and emigration in four Western-Balkan countries: Macedonia, Albania, Serbia and Kosovo, through application of a qualitative forecasting method: a Delphi questionnaire. We solicited consensus building within and between two groups of respondents: 10 experts and 20 receivers were consulted per country in three subsequent rounds -two on the same group, and a third cross-round whereby average answers of receivers were given to experts, and vice versa. Consensual results suggest that remittances in the projected five-year period will increase in Macedonia and Serbia, and will reduce in Albania and Kosovo. With lower consensus, results forecast that emigration will decelerate in Macedonia, Albania and Kosovo, and will accelerate in Serbia by 2021. Emigration effects for the society have been forecasted to be predominantly negative due to skilled labour emigration, while remittances were forecasted to maintain their effect on poverty in Macedonia and Serbia, and weaken it in Albania. In all four countries, expert and receivers were in agreement that remittances will continue to support current consumption only. On the other hand, Macedonians lacked consensus on remittances' effect on the labour market, whereby experts agreed that remittances will support inactivity, while receivers -employment. On the other hand, there has been a consensus achieved in the other three countries that remittances will support labour-market activity.

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