Bracket Creep, Effective Marginal Tax Rates and Alternative Tax Packages Paper

The objective of this research is to shed some light on the current situation regarding the tax and social security system. There are two main issues that will be examined in particular. These are bracket creep and high marginal effective tax rates. It is expected that the former will mostly affect middle and high-income Australians whereas the latter is a problem for low-income families who are affected by the interaction of the tax and social security system.

The project will be carried out in two stages. The first stage's main aim is to describe the current situation. In the second stage, alternative approaches to reforms of the tax and social security system are proposed and compared on a cost and effectiveness basis.

Funded by : The Australian.

Project leader : Professor Peter Dawkins

Researchers : Dr Hielke Buddelmeyer, Professor John Freebairn and Dr Guyonne Kalb

The project started in December 2003 and finished at the end of February 2004.

This project has been completed. The results of this project appeared in several articles in The Australian during the week from Saturday 21 February to Saturday 28 February 2004 in the series "Too much tax".

Brief report complete with the complete set of tables produced for The Australian (pdf 1,881 Kb)