A roundup of economic news from around the Web.
–Tax Breaks: Mike Konczal takes a close look at tax breaks. “To get a sense of the size and importance of these things, consider this: The top 10 tax expenditures total about $900 billion a year. Over half of them go to the top 20 percent of households. About a third go to the top 1 percent. The easiest way to understand the tax break state is to think of it in three clusters: (1) tax credits that boost the earnings of those in the bottom half of the income distribution, (2) tax deductions and exclusions that boost the middle class and upper-middle class, and (3) the exclusion of capital gains and dividends from income taxation, which goes to the top 1 percent.”
–Household Debt: The Economist charts changes in household debt across the world. “In the years leading up to the financial crisis, household debt soared in most rich countries. There were a couple of notable exceptions: Germany and Japan, neither of which experienced a housing boom that caused debt to accumulate. The ratio of debt to disposable income rose by an average of 30 percentage points, to 130%, in OECD countries between pre-boom 2000 and pre-crisis 2007. Since then debt levels have fallen in America, Britain and Germany, but they have continued to rise in countries such as France, Italy and the Netherlands, where property prices are still declining. In 2012 household debt in the Netherlands was a whopping 285% of disposable income.”
–Trade: Bernard Hoekman and Ben Shepherd examine trade policy. “Making international trade easier and less bureaucratic – trade facilitation in WTO jargon – is one of the few areas where WTO talks are still making progress. This column discusses recent research that looks at the distribution of gains from trade facilitation among exporters of different sizes. Firm-level data from many developing countries show that firms of all sizes export more in response to improved trade facilitation.”
Compiled by Phil Izzo
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