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This Article outlines and assesses changes to the tax and welfare system announced as part of Budget 2022. It first looks at the main taxation measures announced before turning to employment, education and social welfare supports. It then considers the effect of the package of measures as a whole on the incomes of households using representative survey data from the Survey of Incomes and Living Conditions run on SWITCH – the ESRI’s tax and benefit microsimulation model – and ITSim – an indirect tax microsimulation model developed jointly by the ESRI and the Department of Finance. The Article concludes with some brief reflections on inflation forecasts and the policy-making process.

The paper examines the effects of the age-differentiated decreases in the minimum wage which Greece implemented in 2012, and which involved the introduction of a subminimum wage as a result of the reduction of the minimum wage by 22% for workers aged 25 and above, and by 32% for those aged less than 25. Using data from the Greek Labor Force Survey, we estimate probit models and find that after the reform there was no statistically significant change in the differential employment probability advantage for private sector employees aged 25-27 over those aged 22-24. We also find that the probability of labour force participation for individuals in the 25-27 group becomes significantly higher (relative to the 22-24 group), which is reflected in a (statistically) significant improvement in the relative job finding rate for non-agricultural, private-sector employees of this group after the reform. Moreover, the reform had no significant differential impact on employment terminations; i.e. it had no differential impact on either dismissals or quits. These findings remain unaltered to a series of robustness checks.

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Ireland is an outlier among EU countries as it does not have a strong link between previous earnings and the level of payment provided to those who have recently lost their job or are on leave from work for the short- to medium-term for reasons of illness or maternity. This paper provides a historical background for earnings-related benefits in Ireland, outlines the rationale behind linking benefits with previous earnings and examines the potential impact of (re)instating them.