Healthcare systems aim to provide access to good quality care, while ensuring equity and solidarity. The fiscal sustainability of healthcare systems has become a matter of concern in recent European Union (EU) debates, considering the ever increasing need for adequate healthcare determined by factors such as aging population, investments in technology and infrastructure, medical products and wages. Our paper seeks to measure the health system performances of the EU countries by building up a composite index, which will then be used as a tool in investigating the relationship between health performance and the fiscal sustainability of health systems. A principal components analysis (PCA) was applied to build the composite index through the use of the most relevant health indicators provided by Eurostat and the Sustainable Development Knowledge Platform. The composite index offers a comprehensive performance assessment and provides a clear ranking of the EU countries based on their health system performances. Further investigation of the link between health performance and fiscal sustainability revealed that higher ranks are associated with higher shares of health expenditures in gross domestic product (GDP), a large share of employment in the health sector, and higher duration of working life. These patterns are followed by efficient health systems, encountering reduced sustainability risks.

Taking into consideration the recent debates on adopting a progressive tax system over the flat-rate taxation, our paper aims to investigate the impact of a change in the current Romanian personal income tax policy system from the 10% flat-rate tax system to some alternative progressive taxation scenarios. The methodological approach consisted in using the European Union Survey on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) database to micro-simulate the impact upon poverty and income inequality. Through our ex-ante tax policy analysis we bring empirical evidence of a modest, but positive effect upon poverty rate and income inequalities in favor of a progressive taxation system. However, when looking at the government financial implications through the personal income tax budget revenues, we discuss upon the possible trade-off between the benefits on poverty and income inequalities and the possible budgetary drawbacks. Despite the data limitations, this study has the benefit of being among the first attempts to evaluate the impact of a personal income tax policy reform for the case of Romania.

Starting from the consideration that excessive income inequalities could hamper sustainable growth, our paper aims to evaluate the impact of the minimum wage policy upon wage and income distributions. Using the European Union Survey on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) database with national representative sample of households, an income distribution analysis was conducted for the case of Romania based on two microsimulation approaches. The first one assumed building a counterfactual income distribution under the hypothesis of no change in minimum wage, while the second one implied a decomposition of the Gini coefficient of income inequalities based on main income determinants, including the minimum wage level and the share of minimum wage earners in the total number of employees. Both approaches pointed to similar findings, indicating a positive effect of the minimum wage on wage inequalities reduction for both genders, although higher for women, as they are more present among lower paid employees. The minimum wage policy can reshape the wage distribution, by enlarging the share of minimum income earners and narrowing the middle. Moreover, the household disposable income becomes less unequal when minimum wage increases, meaning that the income gain spreads over the entire household as most minimum wage earners come from poor households with numerous children.

The main aim of the paper is to investigate European Union people’s perceptions on the gender pay gap, concentrating on the differences between countries and social groups. The focus of our analysis is on the following research questions: a) Are people in countries with fewer low-wage earners more aware of the gender pay gap than the others? Are high educated people and older workers more affected by the gender pay inequalities? Descriptive statistics and logistic regression applied on 28093 observations extracted from EUROBAROMETER 87.4 (2017) confirmed the two hypotheses and brought in addition other interesting and somehow conflicting results. Namely, in some of the countries, people’ perceptions are not supported by statistical data. In Luxembourg and Belgium, for example, even though statistical data demonstrate that the gender pay gap is between the lowest among European Union countries the percentage of those who perceives the inequalities is very high, exceeding 70% in both countries. More than that, in certain countries like Romania, a large number of people considers that gender pay gap is an acceptable phenomenon. Our contribution to the literature is two-fold. First, we have analysed the perceptions on gender pay gap of a large number of respondents and correlated with the reality demonstrated by statistical data. Second, we drew the attention to the fact that closing the ‘gender pay gap’ should be a target of public and private policies especially in high-wage countries, whereas in low-wage countries, the policy makers should focus rather on closing the ‘countries pay gap’, i.e. ensuring that wages are brought closer to the European average, with many economic and social benefits (raising living standards of the citizens, reducing poverty and migration and so on).