Data and Fiscal Institutions of the Surveyed Countries

This chapter describes the data base and provides a detailed survey of the fiscal and social institutions of the countries examined in this book. It is explained how the authors dealt with the LIS microdata and how they rearranged the original data sets to make them suitable for computations. In order to make the relatively complex computations feasible and efficient, while preserving the required level of precision, the data was grouped into 5 percent quantiles. A pre-requisite for embarking on the data analysis is a thorough review of the fiscal and social institutions in the 13 surveyed countries (Australia, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Israel, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, the United Kingdom, and the United States), which is given in the second section of the chapter.