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Gendered taxes: the interaction of tax policy with gender equality

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Abstract

This paper provides an overview of the relationship between tax policy and gender equality, covering labor, capital and wealth, as well as consumption taxes. It considers implicit and explicit gender biases and corrective taxation. On labor taxes, we discuss the well-established findings on female labor supply and present new empirical work on the impact of household taxation. We also analyze the impact of progressivity on pay gaps and labor supply. On capital and wealth taxation, we discuss the implications of lower effective capital income taxation on the personal income tax burden gap across genders. We show that countries with relatively low female shares of capital income and wealth also tend to tax property and inheritances particularly lightly. On consumption taxes, we cover taxes on feminine hygiene products and excise taxes, which we assess in relation to externalities and differences in consumption patterns across genders.

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Fig. 1

Source: LIS and authors’ estimates. Labor income and wage rates are in gross terms. Labor income includes cash payments and value of goods and services received from dependent employment, as well as profits/losses and value of goods from self-employment

Fig. 2

Source: LIS (2021) and authors’ calculations. The horizontal axis captures the gross income share of individuals in the bottom decile, while the vertical axis depicts the share of women in that segment of the population, as a share of men and women in that income decile. The sample corresponds to the following LIS country-year personal surveys, which are collected at the individual level: Australia 2014, Austria 2016, Belgium 2017, Canada 2017, Chile 2017, China 2013, Colombia 2013, Czechia 2016, Estonia 2016, Finland 2016, Germany 2016, Greece 2016, Iceland 2010, Ireland 2017, Israel 2016, Italy 2016, Japan 2013, Lithuania 2017, Luxemburg 2013, Netherlands 2013, Norway 2013, Peru 2016, Russia 2016, Slovakia 2013, Spain 2016, Switzerland 2017, Taiwan 2016, United Kingdom 2017, USA 2018, Brazil 2016, Guatemala 2014, Panama 2016, South Africa 2017

Fig. 3

Source: LIS and authors’ calculations. The sample corresponds to the following LIS country-year surveys: Australia 2014, Austria 2016, Canada 2017, Colombia 2013, Finland 2016, Italy 2016, UK 2017, USA 2018, Brazil 2016, Panama 2016, and South Africa 2017

Fig. 4

Source: LIS, TaxBEN 2.3, and authors’ calculations. The charts are added-variable plots, conditioning on polar cases of labor market structures. One is a model with flexibility in job separation, according to indicators of employment protection and high worker representation (union density): Finland. The other is a model with flexibility in job separation and low worker representation (USA, GBR, and AUS). The horizontal axis depicts the Kakwani progressivity indicator, with higher values representing a more progressive system. The sample corresponds to the following LIS country-year surveys: Australia 2014, Austria 2016, Belgium 2017, Canada 2017, Hungary 2015, Finland 2016, Germany 2016, Greece 2016, Iceland 2010, Ireland 2017, Italy 2016, Lithuania 2017, Netherlands 2013, Slovakia 2013, Spain 2016, Switzerland 2017, UK 2017, USA 2018. The significance level of the correlation in the scatter plots is, 90% (*) or 95% (**)

Fig. 5

Source: Authors’ assumptions and calculations

Fig. 6
Fig. 7
Fig. 8

Source: Author’s estimates based on LIS data access research tool (DART) (2021), Luxembourg wealth strudy (LWS)

Fig. 9

Source: World bank, global financial database, 2017

Fig. 10

Source: World bank gender statistics, latest years; women, business and law, 2020; IMF staff calculations

Fig. 11

Source: Eurostat, IFBD, Statista, and media reports. Notes: Where multiple reduced rates exist, the one for food/necessities is shown. Where VAT does not exist, the sales tax is shown. For countries with regionally varying rates, only the federal or main rate is shown

Fig. 12

Source: World Health Organization and IMF staff calculations

Fig. 13

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Notes

  1. For a previous overview of the issues, see Grown and Valodia (2010), which also includes various valuable country case studies.

  2. Stotsky (1997, p. 1) defines explicit bias as “specific provisions of the law or regulations that identify and treat men and women differently.” The line between explicit and implicit differentiation is not always clear-cut, though. For example, charging a tax only consumed by one gender comes quite close to explicit bias.

  3. We use “marry” and “marriage” to mean any bond between partners that are recognized for tax purposes.

  4. Such trade-offs will also reflect any utility or disutility from working the individual experiences.

  5. Social security contributions are often a flat percent rate with an upper threshold, which makes them regressive.

  6. The related entitlements, however, could be progressive, possibly mitigating that effect.

  7. The Kakwani indicator is the difference between the concentration index (Gini coefficient) of tax liabilities and gross incomes. A positive value indicates that taxes are more concentrated than incomes, and the system is progressive. Higher values in the Kakwani index represent a more progressive system. One feature of this indicator is that it is lower when the before tax distribution is more equal, explaining the low value for countries such as Finland. Another issue is that given data limitations, we had to estimate the Kakwani indicator using income deciles, thereby missing out on income inequality within deciles. Where income inequality is very high in the top decile (as is likely the case in the USA) or where only the top decile pays tax (as in Hungary, where a large personal allowance applied in 2015), this results in high redistribution estimates.

  8. An algebraically equivalently method is to sum up the spouses’ incomes and divide the sum by two, which is known as “income splitting,” and then apply the unchanged thresholds.

  9. A theoretical justification for that would be that there are economies of scale in household production and shared durable goods, so that a couple’s ability to pay is greater than that of two singles, even if the couple’s combined income equals the sum of the singles’.

  10. In a system with a marriage penalty, this effect would be even greater (but the opposite effect on the higher earner would be smaller).

  11. The entitlements gained through the spouse are less certain though and can create dependencies if they are lost in case of divorce.

  12. The tax-induced work disincentives for secondary earners would generally be even stronger in the presence of children.

  13. The LIS country-year surveys included in the estimation are Australia 2014, Austria 2016, Belgium 2017, Canada 2017, Czechia 2016, Estonia 2016, Finland 2016, Germany 2016, Greece 2016, Hungary 2015, Iceland 2010, Ireland 2017, Israel 2017, Italy 2016, Lithuania 2017, Luxemburg 2013, Netherlands 2013, Slovakia 2017, Spain 2016, Switzerland 2017, USA 2017, UK 2017.

  14. Zero income individuals are included in the calculation, as they represent people who are not employed or out of the labor force.

  15. See the regression results and some robustness checks in the Annex. The robustness checks focus on testing for non-linearities of tax disincentives along the income distribution of both spouses.

  16. Since the intensive margin regression may be subject to selection bias, a Heckman selection model is also estimated (see the Annex). The selection equation in this model assumes that the observed gender differential in work hours, as well as spouses’ wage rates, in a given household-type and a given country-year, depend on the female and male labor force participations rates observed for such household-type and country-year. The results of the selection model are qualitatively consistent with the baseline regression. The coefficient on tax disincentives is ¾ the size of the one in the baseline specification, but the estimated effects remain economically and statistically significant.

  17. Tax jointness refers to the dependence of the marginal tax rate of one spouse on the income of the other spouse. “Positive tax jointness” occurs if the marginal tax rate has a positive relationship with the spouse’s income, otherwise it is “negative tax jointness.”.

  18. See, for example, Himmelweit’s (2002) discussion of the Working Families Tax Credit in the UK.

  19. Since then, incomes have been calculated independently, though until 2000, there was a married-couples allowance, later grandfathered only for elder couples (Seely, 2021).

  20. Opponents, however, argue that, while deductions for business-related expenses are non-controversial, personal expenses should not be deductible, because they are part of the consumption basket and should be included in the tax base (otherwise, parents would receive special treatment compared to families with no children; McCaffery, 1993).

  21. For the few countries where data are available.

  22. Albeit the inferences from this study’s results being more limited due to relying solely on single households, and thus not being necessarily representative of married households, which are typically wealthier.

  23. Note these percentages are most likely illustrative of the broader asymmetry, rather than objectively informative, since the definition of “self-made” billionaire is not transparent in these surveys.

  24. Exceptions, when they exist, are driven by households where women are the only adults, as opposed to dual man-woman adult households, as well as specifically in matrilineal communities. Kilic et al. (2021) illustrate the challenges in obtaining accurate individual-level data on asset ownership from household surveys.

  25. As defined by the WBL’s three relevant questions: (i) Do men and women have equal ownership rights to immovable property?; (ii) Does the law grant spouses equal administrative authority over assets during marriage?; and (iii) Does the law provide for the valuation of nonmonetary contributions?

  26. We do not however rule out that other factors may also simultaneously lead to lower female property rights and low political prioritization of property taxation – such as poor female political representation (Brulé, 2020) or social norms biased toward male effective ownership and control (USAID, 2013).

  27. Furthermore, given the market failure in business credit access for women on average described above, an argument could be made for the introduction of gender-based capital income taxation to partially correct for their average disadvantage in generating such income.

  28. 31 Measures of this sort are not a panacea, however, and can be abused for tax avoidance by having property only nominally transferred to a female in the household when the transaction happens between two men, for example. Chakraborty et al. (2010) identify a related tax avoidance mechanism through which higher income men transferred capital-generating assets to women in the household to benefit from the higher personal income tax exemption allowance that existed in India prior to 2013.

  29. 32 One complication is that the externality/internality may not be independent of gender. Notably, there is some research suggesting tobacco taxation can be particularly effective at reducing smoking during pregnancy for women, which then translates into improved educational outcomes of children from low socioeconomic backgrounds (Settele and van Ewijk 2018). This would argue for a higher excise on cigarettes consumed by pregnant women, but such differentiated excise would not be enforceable. In addition, the optimal commodity taxation argument referenced here is based solely on the Ramsey rule, rather than the Corlett and Hague (1953) rule (for lack of information on the leisure complementarity of tobacco consumption specifically).

  30. Only those laws that were ambiguous on the gender of the “head of household” and those that clearly signified the man are included as explicit biases. Those that specifically clarified that a head of household could be male or female, for example by using pronouns “he or she” were not counted.

  31. For details on this complex system see Smith (2001)

  32. This strand of the literature builds on the seminal work by Ramsey (1927), which was generalized to incorporate heterogenous agents and nonlinear income taxation by Mirrlees (1971).

  33. According to Rossin-Slater (2017), in 47 out of 185 countries such costs are borne by employers, in the remainder it is the tax or social security system.

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Acknowledgements

We are grateful for helpful comments by Qiaoe Chen, Matthew Commey, Ruud de Mooij, Liz Gavin, Caren Grown, Gayatri Koolwal, Cindy Negus, Alpa Shah, Alberto Soler, Nikola Spatafora, Janet Stotsky, Xin Tang, Marina Mendes Tavares, Solo Zerbo, Qianqian Zhang, IMF and NTA seminar participants, and two anonymous referees.

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    Maria Coelho, Aieshwarya Davis, Alexander Klemm & Carolina Osorio-Buitron

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  1. Maria Coelho
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  4. Carolina Osorio-Buitron
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Correspondence to Maria Coelho.

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We are grateful for helpful comments by Qiaoe Chen, Matthew Commey, Ruud de Mooij, Liz Gavin, Caren Grown, Gayatri Koolwal, Cindy Negus, Alpa Shah, Alberto Soler, Nikola Spatafora, Janet Stotsky, Xin Tang, Marina Mendes Tavares, Solo Zerbo, Qianqian Zhang, IMF and NTA seminar participants, and two anonymous referees.

Annex

Annex

See Appendix Table 1, 2, 3.

Table 1 Characteristics of personal income tax systems
Full size table
Table 2 Determinants of gender gap in labor force participation
Full size table
Table 3 Determinants of gender gap in hours worked
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Coelho, M., Davis, A., Klemm, A. et al. Gendered taxes: the interaction of tax policy with gender equality. Int Tax Public Finance (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10797-024-09829-w

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