TY  - JOUR
AU  - Yitzhaki,Shlomo
TI  - A Public Finance Approach to Assessing Poverty Alleviation
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 8062
PY  - 2001
Y2  - January 2001
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w8062
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w8062.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Shlomo Yitzhaki
Department of Economics
Hebrew University
Mount Scopus
Jerusalem 91905
ISRAEL
Tel: 972-2-659-2201
Fax: 972-2-652-2319
E-Mail: shlomo.yitzhaki@huji.ac.il
AB  - This paper points out the similarities and differences between cost-benefit analysis and tax reform. By restricting the analysis to the margin it is shown that both areas can be handled by the same method. In both areas, there is a need to define social distributional weights and to evaluate the Marginal Efficiency of Public Funds (MECF). It is suggested that the social distributional weights be derived from popular inequality indices. Such derivation, enables the decomposition of the impact of the project (tax reform) on growth and redistribution so that one can evaluate the trade-off between the two.
ER  -