Scottish Income Tax: distributional analysis 2023-24

Footnotes

1 Further information can be found in our Income Tax fact sheet.

2 This year’s counterfactual scenario is different from the approach used in previous years which considered the distributional impact against the Scottish Government’s Income Tax policy choices on Scottish taxpayers since devolution in 2016-17. This allows us to highlight the impact of this year’s policy measures specifically.

3 The Gini co-efficient is a measure of how equally income is distributed across the population. It takes a value between 0 and 1 where 0 represents perfect equality.

4 The Equality Act (2010) protects people against discrimination and the Act identifies nine protected characteristics, including Age, Disability, Gender reassignment, Marriage and civil partnership, Pregnancy and maternity, Race, Religion or belief, Sex, and Sexual orientation. For some protected characteristics, information on income and poverty is limited. Therefore the analysis in this note, which is largely based on taxpayer information from the Survey of Personal Incomes (SPI) can only explore impacts on gender, age and disability.

5 Some Income Tax records, accounting for 2.4% of total liabilities, do not have a gender indicator.