An Analysis of Women's Labour Force Participation in Portugal: A Comparison of Some Tax Systems

• Autor(a) principal: Marques, Ana Cristina Lino
• Data de Publicação: 1994
• Outros Autores: Telhado Pereira, Pedro
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10362/87356

Among the European countries, Portugal has one of the highest female's participation rate in the labour market, so it doesn't follow the characteristic behaviour of South European Countries. In this paper, we analyse the sensitivity of the Portuguese married women's labor supply to some reforms of the labor income taxation. We study three points of the budget set: 0, 20 and 40 hours (probability of not working, part time and full time work), so the marginal wage rate is considered exogenous. We estimate an average after tax wage to include in the logit analysis of married women's labor force participation. The estimated coefficients have the signs expected; for instance, children decrease the probability of the mothers to work and this negative influence decreases with the age of children. The fiscal simulations show that Portuguese married women are not so sensitive to fiscal policy as the German and Swedish wives; unlike the studies for those countries the change is never greater than 10%, even if the 1990 Portuguese income taxation is somewhere in between the separate taxation (Sweden) and the splitting system (Germany) - joint taxation with splitting factor 2 to two earner couples and 1.85 to one earner couple. The results show that the outline value of the married women's labor supply can't be accounted for fiscal differences only.