This working paper uses the EUROMOD tax-benefit microsimulation model and its Labour Market Adjustment (LMA) Add-On together with EU-SILC microdata to construct country-specific scenarios that simulate the full and partial closure of the Gender Employment Gap and explore the resulting fiscal and distributional consequences. Particularly, we aim at simulating the narrowing and closure of the gender employment gap in four selected EU countries (France, Italy, Romania and Sweden) and see the effects on fiscal space, poverty rates and income inequality across households.
The paper is structured as follows. We first present an overview of the relevance of the gender employment gap, after which we provide information on the data used, the methodology adopted for imputations and simulations. The fourth section reports the results on the effects of achieving the two simulated policy scenarios – one showing the impact of narrowing the GEG to the EPSR target and one of full GEG-closure. This followed by the sensitivity checks, and two extensions of the analysis: one where we simulate an existent Italian policy that favour female employment, and one that instead accounts for the projected changes in the demographic structure over the coming years. The final section of the paper presents the concluding findings.
Authors: Arianna Vivoli, Federico Ciani