Gauging fiscal worlds : How the EU countries balanced equality and wealth between 2007 and 2016

Can income equality and national wealth go hand in hand? This issue has long marked the distance between the neoliberal and the social democratic policy paradigms. By combining so far unrelated streams of literature, we sketch a theoretical framework in which fiscal policies shape four “fiscal worlds”, each of them characterized by a special balance between income equality and national wealth. Then, we resort to Boolean algebra and fuzzy sets to develop a measure that encompasses both these policy outcomes at once without assuming any a priori functional relationship. Last, we assess the heuristic capacity of our measure by mapping the EU countries’ membership to the four fiscal worlds from 2007 until 2016 and the trajectories they followed.