IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/jid/journl/y2007v16i3-4p55-70.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The Role of Personal Income Tax to Mitigate Widening Income Inequality: the Case of Japan

Author

Listed:
  • Ejii Tajika

    (Hitotsubashi University)

  • Hiroyuki Yashio

    (Kyoto Sangyo University)

Abstract

The Japanese personal income tax system has been designed to mitigate the tax burden by granting generous deductions and by employing a steep marginal tax curve. The failure of it is that the combined burden of tax and social-security contributions of low-income people has not been dealt with. The purposes of this article are twofold: first, to show that the social-security burden is in fact higher than the tax liability for most of the working population, and second, to show that it is possible to mitigate the burden by introducing refundable tax credits. Results of micro-simulation using a survey of household income are presented to show the combined tax and socialsecurity burden of families of various income classes.

Suggested Citation

  • Ejii Tajika & Hiroyuki Yashio, 2007. "The Role of Personal Income Tax to Mitigate Widening Income Inequality: the Case of Japan," Journal of Income Distribution, Ad libros publications inc., vol. 16(3-4), pages 55-70, September.
    • Handle: RePEc:jid:journl:y:2007:v:16:i:3-4:p:55-70
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://jid.journals.yorku.ca/index.php/jid/article/view/7230
    Download Restriction: Some fulltext downloads are only available to subscribers. See JID website for details.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Hiroyuki Yashio & Keishi Hachisuka, 2014. "Impact of Population Aging on the Personal Income Tax Base in Japan : Simulation Analysis of Taxation on Pension Benefits Using Micro Data," Public Policy Review, Policy Research Institute, Ministry of Finance Japan, vol. 10(3), pages 519-542, October.
    2. Heller, Peter S., 2016. "The challenge of an aged and shrinking population: Lessons to be drawn from Japan’s experience," The Journal of the Economics of Ageing, Elsevier, vol. 8(C), pages 85-93.
    3. Elena S. Vylkova, 2021. "Personal income tax: Reforms in Russia and their impact on the income inequality," Journal of New Economy, Ural State University of Economics, vol. 22(2), pages 5-22, July.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    personal-income tax; deductions; credits; social security; globalization;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D31 - Microeconomics - - Distribution - - - Personal Income and Wealth Distribution
    • H24 - Public Economics - - Taxation, Subsidies, and Revenue - - - Personal Income and Other Nonbusiness Taxes and Subsidies

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:jid:journl:y:2007:v:16:i:3-4:p:55-70. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Timm Boenke (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/gyorkca.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.