Impuesto negativo al ingreso del trabajo: una política contra la desigualdad

This article presents the earned income tax credit (EITC), an instrument that consists in topping up lower-paid workers’ earnings with cash transfers. As a social policy, it has the advantage of being an effective mechanism for tackling inequality that does not greatly interfere with the trade-off between leisure and work but encourages labour market participation and formalization, cuts poverty and reduces the stigma attached to being a social programme beneficiary. This instrument is offered for two purposes: (i) as an actual policy option and (ii) as a benchmark for contrasting the potential cost-effectiveness of any other public policy intended to reduce inequality. The paper applies a genetic algorithm for numerical optimization to evaluate the parameters that optimally minimize income inequality and shows that, for example, spending 5.000 million dollars a year would reduce the Gini by between 4.7 and 6.1 points, which is more than the entire reduction recorded between 1990 and 2015.