Mhux disponibbli bil-Malti
Myroslav Pidkuyko
- 16 October 2023
- OCCASIONAL PAPER SERIES - No. 330Details
- Abstract
- This paper analyses the distributional impact of high consumer inflation in the euro area and government measures to compensate households in 2022. The study uses the tax-benefit microsimulation model for the European Union (EUROMOD) with microdata as the input – EU statistics on income and living conditions (EU-SILC) and household budget surveys (HBS) – to quantify the distributional impact of inflation, income support measures and measures aimed at containing prices. The analysis confirms that purchasing power and welfare were more severely affected by the 2022 inflation surge in lower-income households than in higher-income households. Fiscal measures compensated households for about a third of their welfare loss, though with significant differences between countries. At the same time, fiscal measures closed around 60% of the inequality gap between lower and higher-income households. Most fiscal measures were not particularly well targeted at low-income households, resulting in a higher than necessary fiscal burden to cushion the distributional impact of the inflationary shock.
- JEL Code
- D12 : Microeconomics→Household Behavior and Family Economics→Consumer Economics: Empirical Analysis
D31 : Microeconomics→Distribution→Personal Income, Wealth, and Their Distributions
D60 : Microeconomics→Welfare Economics→General
E31 : Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics→Prices, Business Fluctuations, and Cycles→Price Level, Inflation, Deflation
H20 : Public Economics→Taxation, Subsidies, and Revenue→General
I30 : Health, Education, and Welfare→Welfare, Well-Being, and Poverty→General
- 21 September 2021
- OCCASIONAL PAPER SERIES - No. 275Details
- Abstract
- This report discusses the role of the European Union’s full employment objective in the conduct of the ECB’s monetary policy. It first reviews a range of indicators of full employment, highlights the heterogeneity of labour market outcomes within different groups in the population and across countries, and documents the flatness of the Phillips curve in the euro area. In this context, it is stressed that labour market structures and trend labour market outcomes are primarily determined by national economic policies. The report then recalls that, in many circumstances, inflation and employment move together and pursuing price stability is conducive to supporting employment. However, in response to economic shocks that give rise to a temporary trade-off between employment and inflation stabilisation, the ECB’s medium-term orientation in pursuing price stability is shown to provide flexibility to contribute to the achievement of the EU’s full employment objective. Regarding the conduct of monetary policy in a low interest rate environment, model-based simulations suggest that history-dependent policy approaches − which have been proposed to overcome lasting shortfalls of inflation due to the effective lower bound on nominal interest rates by a more persistent policy response to disinflationary shocks − can help to bring employment closer to full employment, even though their effectiveness depends on the strength of the postulated expectations channels. Finally, the importance of employment income and wealth inequality in the transmission of monetary policy strengthens the case for more persistent or forceful easing policies (in pursuit of price stability) when interest rates are constrained by their lower bound.
- JEL Code
- E52 : Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics→Monetary Policy, Central Banking, and the Supply of Money and Credit→Monetary Policy
E24 : Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics→Consumption, Saving, Production, Investment, Labor Markets, and Informal Economy→Employment, Unemployment, Wages, Intergenerational Income Distribution, Aggregate Human Capital