Essays on the distribution of taxes, food expenditures, and income in urban households: A regional analysis of Korea, China, Taiwan, and Japan

The research is organized into three independent essays, which appear in Chapters Two, Three, and Four. The first essay analyzes the effects of direct taxes on the distribution of income and tax burdens across time and among urban households in Korea. Two related but distinct global progressivity measurement techniques are used in this study. One approach, residual progression, emphasizes the redistributive effects of taxes on the income distribution while the other, liability progression, focuses on the differences in the distribution of income tax burdens. Using South Korean data, a check for crossings in the underlying Lorenz and tax concentration curves reveals that we can be confident that residual progression has declined across time. For liability progression, however, there are a significant number of crossings, and care must be exercised in interpreting changes in the progressivity of income taxes.;The second essay estimates income elasticities of food expenditure within and between urban and rural regions in China and Taiwan. A recently developed methodology draws on Lorenz curves and associated concentration curves of consumption to estimate income elasticities of the underlying demand for a commodity. This study provides several important results. First, the estimates of the overall elasticity indices imply that urban China's food demand is generally more elastic than rural China. Second, urban Taiwan's food demand is less income elastic than the seven major urban regions in China. Finally, the results of this research reveal supporting evidence concerning Bishop et al.'s (1996) recent study of food consumption across the urban regions of China.;The third essay is a time series analysis of the determinants of Japan's income distribution. The effects of macroeconomic, demographic, structural and policy variables on the Gini, quintile income shares, and Lorenz ordinates are estimated using more than four decades of annual data. The results reveal little evidence of any systematic effect of various macroeconomic variables on income distribution in Japan.