Introduction

In this section of the web site, you can access a detailed documentation of the Belgian tax-benefit system. Such documentation was written by the beamm developers as a theoretical support to the simulation model, and it was made available in this user-friendly format using the bookdown R package. Precisely, to every tax or benefit whose parameters can be changed in the simulator corresponds a chapter in the current section. While the description of the various parameters in the actual simulator is concise, we refer in fact to the present documentation for more thorough information. Namely, in Chapters 1-8, a range of taxes and benefits is presented, with no particular order. In Chapters 9-13, the determination of the social security contributions is explained in detail. Chapters 14, 15 and 16 are devoted to the calculation of the VAT, the wealth tax and the car taxation, respectively. Chapters 17-20 conclude with the Personal Income Tax.

The last four subsections of every chapter are titled all the same, and they are particularly relevant for understanding how each part of the tax-benefit system was modelled into the beamm simulator:

  • Modelling assumptions: in this subsection, eventual simplifications carried out from the real functioning of the tax/benefit in question to its form, as modelled in beamm, are listed;
  • Module Input:
    • Variables: in this sub-subsection, the variables used to compute the tax/benefit at hand are listed;
    • Parameters: in this sub-subsection, the parameters used to compute the tax/benefit at hand are listed. These parameters are the same that can be changed in the simulator;
  • Module Output: in this subsection, the final outputs of the computation are listed, normally simply the tax/benefit in question;
  • References: in this subsection, the list of sources employed to write the corresponding chapter are listed.