4.1 Motivations and Objectives

Taxation is the principal mechanism through which redistribution of income from the rich to the poor takes place. The analysis of taxation is one of the major pieces of tasks of economists who analyze public sector economics. Taxes can be distinguished with respect to the effects they generate on the distribution of income. While raising revenue for some specific welfare purposes, it is ethically desirable that a tax scheme should exert an equalizing effect on the distribution of income; the rich should bear a greater share of the tax burden than the poor. This makes the after-tax income distribution more equal than its before-tax twin. In the process, the tax burdens come to be more unequally distributed than the pre-tax incomes. These two effects of a tax system are referred to as the “redistributive” effect and the “disproportionality” (or “departure from proportionality”) effect of a tax system. (For a recent discussion on these features of a tax system, see Chakravarty and Sarkar, 2025.)

Now, the basic definition of progression of an income tax system is that the local measure “average rate progression,” the tax liability as a proportion of the income, should rise with income (Pigou, 1928). A local or structural indicator looks at the extent of progression along the income scale; it focuses on income-by-income progression.

2.1 Motivations and Objectives

We have argued in Chapter 1 that a more uniform distribution of income in a population makes individuals better off economically in respect of income. Since high income inequality is likely to generate financial hardship for the lower-income sections of the population and social discontentment and political instability, any society should reduce its high inequality to a reasonably low level.

For determining the level of equality we need a yardstick that summarizes the closeness of incomes of different individuals. Such an indicator gives us a concrete idea about the deviation of the actual distribution from the norm, the distribution of perfectly equal incomes. An adequate indicator of income equality should incorporate interpersonal comparisons so that a redistribution of income from a better-off individual to a worse-off individual, such that the donor does not become poorer than the recipient, generates a better state of incomes, as desired from a social welfare standpoint. Equivalently, we say that equality increases under a progressive transfer of income, a Robin Hood operation. In the literature this notion of value judgment is known as the Pigou–Dalton transfer principle. It represents the egalitarian ethic that higher equality of incomes among individuals is socially preferred. A second value judgment involved in equality evaluation is anonymity; any reordering of incomes does not change the degree of equality – reflecting irrelevance of all characteristics other than income.

Data about Earth obtained from space provide vital insights for disaster mitigation, weather prediction, natural resource management, agricultural efficiency, human migration, and climate change. This chapter addresses legal and normative frameworks that exist for sharing such data, including the Outer Space Treaty, the Remote Sensing Principles, the International Charter on Space and Major Disasters, and the World Meteorological Organization’s Resolution 40. It addresses the role of commercial actors, the types of data (raw, processed, analyzed), and provides suggestions to further develop and improve mechanisms for sharing such vital data.

The purpose of this coursebook is to establish inter-linkage among three different features of social wellbeing – namely equality, depolarization, and tax progressivity – all based on society's income distributions. Low equality is socially dispreferred since it refers to the accumulation of a highly significant part of the total income of the society in the possession of a few. Depolarization is concerned with the improvement in the level of wellbeing of the middle-income group of the society. The existence of a rich middle class in a society is always desirable, since a wealthy middle-income group contributes highly to the society's economic growth and development in many ways. Tax progressivity investigates the extent to which equality is raised through taxation.

Chapter 1 presents an introductory outline of the materials analyzed in the remaining chapters. Chapter 2 formally defines and analyzes the notion of equality. Chapter 3 provides a rigorous treatment of the concept of depolarization.

In Chapter 4 we discuss different structural or local indicators of tax progressivity that look at the extent of progression at each income point. We look particularly at the redistributive and departure from the proportionality effects of taxation. We also investigate the implication of structural measures with respect to depolarization. One section of the chapter examines the impacts of equal proportionate income growths on revenue and redistributive effects of taxation. Given the before-tax income distribution, the impacts of equal proportionate increase in taxes on structural measures are investigated as well.

The United Nations recently reported that while 90 percent of countries prioritize action on water for adaptation on their national climate financing agenda, 50 percent of countries revealed that they do not have the formal national mechanisms to facilitate cross-sectoral coordination that is critical to ensure resilient socioecological systems (United Nations 2023). Conventional environmental models are, however, unable to account for poor coordination between the proposed technical/management options and the environmental outcomes, which are often shaped by uncertainty and changes that arise in the policy environment. The use of improved assessment methods which can capture a complete view is thus required to design technologies and management systems to restore climate resilience. In this regard, this chapter discusses two methodological innovations (trade-off intensity and typology assessments) that can unleash insights on structural variables that intersect with forces of history, norms, and hierarchy to produce changes in collective behavior while they have an ameliorating impact on environmental and social outcomes in the context of climate change. The authors rely on an analysis of five cases of common pool resources management combined with an expert panel review of climate loss and damage in Jordan to examine their implications for the knowledge commons framework.

With the multiplication of space operators and the increasing number of operators involved in space missions, state and nonstate stakeholders are currently intensifying their efforts in enhancing space situational awareness by collecting data related to outer space. These efforts are both technical innovations and political and legal strategies. This chapter addresses the ways states collect, exchange, use, and manage data, and who benefits from the development of space situational awareness, especially in light of current multilateral discussions on space security and safety.