participation in paid work and payment of income tax. A recent study (Lugo, Muller, and Wai-Poi 2020) identified a number of barriers to Jordanian, Lebanese and Iraqi women undertaking paid work, a number of which have fiscal implications, including a lack of affordable and quality childcare and a lack of affordable and safe public transport. It also identified that household demographics can play a role in the likelihood that women engage in paid employment (for example, the presence of additional adult women in the household who can contribute to childcare responsibilities increases the likelihood of women participating in the labour force). A similar conclusion is reached in a forthcoming study focusing on the time use of women in Jordan (Woodham and Wai-Poi _forthcoming_ ).

# III. Methodology

The first step in the analysis is to identify which household categories are relevant in Jordan. We do so from what we call i) a care perspective, ii) a fiscal perspective, and iii) a contribution to household income perspective. A relatively small number of categories are needed, but what these categories might be, and how many, in a particular country is an empirical question. Each category should not represent too many people so as not to obscure differences between them nor so small as to lack salience relative to the entire population. The differences between categories should be based on those relevant to intended analysis and the differences within categories immaterial for these purposes. Both care and fiscal categories are driven by the same demographic dimensions (number of adults and their marital status, number and age of children and elderly people), although these characteristics guide the two sets of categories in different ways. Thus, the two typologies could substantially overlap. If there is a strong overlap in membership, a single typology could be used throughout the analysis, making both analysis and exposition easier. We also define gender majority typology based on the contribution of men and women to household income, which is akin to the categorization used by Greenspun in Latin America and Fuchs and Gonzalez Icaza in Armenia.

Once these categories are identified, the benefits and burdens of Jordan’s fiscal policy can be allocated among them to examine the extent to which household composition affects fiscal incidence. The fiscal incidence analysis follows the CEQ internationally recognized methodology (Lustig 2018). This analysis starts with pre-fiscal or market income and allocates the following fiscal interventions: direct taxes (personal income taxes); indirect taxes (general and special sales taxes and excises); direct social transfers (NAF and the bread compensation scheme); indirect subsidies (electricity and water); and in-kind benefits (education and health) as seen in Figure 1.<sup>9</sup> For a full description of the fiscal instruments and how these are allocated to households see Annex I or Rodriguez and Wai-Poi (2021). We assess the distribution of each fiscal intervention independently as well as the overall performance of the system. Up to this point, the allocation of fiscal instruments simply replicates that conducted in the aforementioned main fiscal incidence analysis paper (Rodriguez and Wai-Poi 2021).

To assess the impact of the fiscal instruments on poverty we use the national poverty line. Then, we depart from the standard CEQ methodology to evaluate the fiscal system’s distributional impacts across the different household care and fiscal household categories. Firstly, we use a Theil index instead of a Gini to

> 9 Note that HEIS contains information to construct welfare aggregates based on household income and consumption. The official poverty measurement uses consumption as the welfare aggregate. Following standard methodology (Lustig 2018), this means that in practical terms the calculation of the income concepts begins by equating household consumption to disposable income and then working backward (subtract direct transfers and add direct taxes) to construct market income.