Needs and Targeting

Tagging and Taxing: The Optimal Use of Categorical and Income Information in Designing Tax/Transfer Schemes

“…Though perfectly coherent, this is certainly ad hoc; but so too-in the absence of a more complete treatment of the profound and to some degree unresolved issues raised by differences in neediness or worth (see e.g. Atkinson and Bourguignon 1982;Keen 1992 andLambert 1993)-would be any other social cardinalization of preferences.…”

Equity‐regarding poverty measures: differences in needs and the role of equivalence scales

“…But there is another reason which supports the structure given in : As Ebert (2005) demonstrates, the paradox of targeting – an increase in the needs of some group leads to a reduction of resources allocated to it in an optimal allocation (cf. Keen 1992) – can be avoided only if the weights and equivalence scales are identical. Then, an optimal program for the alleviation of poverty, which is based on uniform poll subsidies or guaranteed minimum income, turns out to be horizontally equitable.…”

“…Method (i): Households receive the same weight (w 1 = · · · = w N ; cf. Keen (1992)). Method (ii): Households are weighted according to the number of household members (w i = i for i = 1, .…”

Poverty and Equity

“…Additional works on optimal income taxation and optimal benefit provision include Besley (1990) (for a comparison of means testing and universal provision of public assis-tance), Besley and Coate (1992) and Besley and Coate (1995) (on the desirability of workfare constraints), Greedy (1996) (for a comparison of means testing and linear taxation for poverty reduction), Fortin, Truchon, and Beausejour (1990) (on comparing workfare and negative income tax systems), Glewwe (1992) (for designing benefit allocation rules when income is not observed), Haddad and Kanbur (1992) (for the potential role of intra-household allocation issues), Immonen, Kanbur, Keen, and Tuomala (1998) (for a comparison of means testing and categorical benefit provision), Kanbur, Keen, and Tuomala (1994b) (for differences in the optimal rules implied by welfarist and non-welfarist social objectives), Keen (1992) (for the link between needs and optimal allocations of benefits), Thorbecke and Berrian (1992) (for generalequilibrium optimal budgetary rules), Viard (2001) (for a theory of optimal categorical transfer payments), and Wane (2001) (for optimal taxation when poverty generates negative externalities on society). …”