H24 - Personal Income and Other Nonbusiness Taxes and Subsidies; includes inheritance and gift taxesReturn

The article deals with the measurement of progressivity of personal income tax in the Czech Republic and Slovakia imposed on wages. It works with both the methods known from the literature: the local method (interval) and global progressivity. The data source is the wage statistics of the Statistical Offices and taxes are calculated fictitiously on the basis of law with adoption of assumptions.
Results for interval progressivity in both countries show that while progressivity of the lowest income taxpayers is higher, it decreases with increasing gross income. Personal income tax in the Czech and Slovak Republics is observed as progressive in the entire range, even though the statutory tax rate is linear.
The Lorenz curve shows that the distributions of gross wages in the Czech Republic and Slovakia are of a similar nature. The values of the coefficient of interval progressivity and the coefficient according to Musgrave and Thin (CR has a coefficient of 1.024 and SR of 1.037) show that personal income tax is more progressive in Slovakia. Although Slovak personal income tax imposed on wages is more progressive, post-tax incomes of employees are more equitably distributed in the Czech Republic.

The present paper deals with the issue of different behaviour of wage distribution of two highest and two lowest-paid sectors of the Czech economy in the period since the beginning of the global economic crisis; the former ones are the sectors of "Financial and Insurance Activities" and "Information and Communication", the latter ones being those of "Accommodation and Food Service Activities" and "Administrative and Support Service Activities". The aim is to capture the differences between these two groups of sectors, not only in terms of wage levels, but also as far as the variability and concentration of wage distribution is concerned. The gross (nominal) monthly wage in CZK represents a research variable. The paper focuses on different developments of wage distribution of the above sector groups in time, wage level forecasts for 2015 and 2016 being included.

Cluster analysis is a method of multivariate data processing. It can be easily applied, for example, by means of statistical software. The article focuses on an application of cluster analysis in the field of taxation. The possibility of applying the method is compared for each tax or groups of taxes at two levels: by an individual state and between selected countries. It is also possible to determine, on the basis of cluster analysis, the impact of taxes on economic operators, which can be sorted according to various criteria (income, types of households represented by their members, etc.). An overview of studies in which the selected method of cluster analysis applied to selected datasets shows that cluster analysis has been supplemented by another statistical method or that the clustering process is repeated on a selected part of a set of objects or characters. The reason is usually better interpretation of results and complementary broader context.