Tax‐benefit policies affect changes in household incomes through two main channels: discretionary policy changes and automatic stabilizers. We study their role in the EU countries in 2007–14 using an extended decomposition approach. Our results show that the two policy actions often reduced rather than increased inequality of net incomes, and so helped offset the inequality‐increasing impact of growing disparities in gross market incomes. While inequality reductions were achieved mainly through benefits using both routes, policy changes to and the automatic stabilization response of taxes and contributions raised inequality in some countries and lowered it in others.

中文翻译：

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危机中的欧洲：自由裁量的政策变化和自动稳定器

税收优惠政策通过两个主要渠道影响家庭收入的变化：可自由支配的政策变化和自动稳定器。我们使用扩展分解方法研究了它们在 2007-14 年间在欧盟国家中的作用。我们的研究结果表明，这两项政策行动往往会减少而不是加剧净收入的不平等，因此有助于抵消市场总收入差距扩大所带来的不平等加剧的影响。虽然减少不平等主要是通过两种途径的收益来实现的，但税收和捐款的政策变化和自动稳定反应在一些国家加剧了不平等，而在另一些国家则降低了不平等。