This issue is the first of three special releases of the Journal of Economic Inequality honoring
the work of Sir Anthony “Tony” Atkinson. It focuses on the analysis of tax-benefit
systems and the way they affect income distribution and welfare. While other tributes have
recalled the extent and depth of Tony’s work on this topic and others, the idea of this issue
is to present modern contributions that reflect Tony’s legacy in this vast field of research.
Tony not only provided some of the most important theoretical characterization of optimal
taxation, and explicitly introduced distributional objectives into measures of inequality, but
also initiated empirical assessments of tax-benefit policies and their effect on inequality,
poverty and public finances.
A key aspect was the development of tax-benefit microsimulation models, computerbased
simulations that enable one to reproduce national tax-benefit systems and, plugged
into nationally representative data, simulate policy reforms and their effect on income distribution.
Tony initiated the very first model in the 1980s and, armed with it, already drew
out the implications of new budgets or policy alternatives in the UK. Today, microsimulations
are used by researchers and analysts in governments, treasuries or statistical institutes
all over the world to provide a rigorous analysis of current policies and support the design
of reforms. This special issue starts with the latest of such analysis by Tony and colleagues
on the UK (Atkinson, Leventi, Nolan, Sutherland and Tasseva).
Tony also devoted a lot of attention to social inclusion and cohesion in Europe, stressing
the importance of having the appropriate tools to understand the distributional implications
of fiscal and social policy changes in a comparative way. This led to the construction of
an EU-wide microsimulation model, EUROMOD, now extensively used by researchers, by
EU Directorates and by the European Commission’s research centers for the monitoring of

• Tax-benefit systems, income distribution and welfare analysis Special issue in homage to Tony Atkinson