Post-Fisc Distributions of Income: Measuring Progressivity With Application To the United States

Abstract

Building upon recent research designed to measure the progressivity of the pub-lic budget, this article contributes a mathematical and computational method for measuring the progressivity of public expenditures and net fiscal incidence (NFI), and derives the mathematical relationship among the NFI progressivity index, the tax progressivity index, and the public expenditure progressivity index. The computational methodology is utilized in a fiscal application to United States data. The results indicate that from 1950 to 1970 the movement toward increased progressivity in the federal expenditure structure was dominated by the combination of the movement toward less progressivity in the state and local expenditure structure, less progressivity in the federal tax structure, and more regressivity in the state and local tax structure. It is shown that from 1950 to 1970 NFI progressivity decreased for all three government levels studied.