care at public facilities but have to pay a 20 percent coinsurance rate for care at private facilities (HalasaRappel _et al._ 2019). In addition to the insured, the subsidised MOH services can also be accessed by uninsured individuals with a 20 percent co-payment.

The public pension system in Jordan is a mandatory contributory pension system managed by the Social Security Corporation. It covers private sector workers, government employees, as well as army officers.<sup>15</sup> The contribution rate is 17.5 percent of the employee’s salary, of which 6.5 percent is paid by the employee and the rest by the employer. Self-employed workers pay the entirety of the contribution. Pensionable age is 60 years old for men and 55 for women, with at least 180 months of contributions (paid or purchased). However, around 60 percent of the people retire before the legal age.

# 3. Data and Methodology

## Data

The work follows the ‘CEQ ‘methodology, an internationally recognised fiscal incidence diagnostic method developed by the Commitment to Equity Institute. This approach uses standard incidence analysis for each tax and transfer. The taxes and transfers from the fiscal accounts are allocated out to households based on the information in national representative household surveys, which include information on household employment and income (determining PIT and receipt of social assistance benefits) and expenditures (indirect taxes and subsidies) as well as use of social services such as health and education. The innovation of the CEQ approach is to combine the sectoral incidence analysis to model the net impact of Jordan’s taxes and transfers on households and determine their welfare and distributional impacts.

The primary data source for households is the 2017-18 HEIS (Household Expenditure and Income Survey) conducted by Jordan’s Department of Statistics. It contains detailed data on household expenditure and income, as well as on direct transfers and household use of education services. There data are also the base for the country’s most recent official poverty estimates. The HEIS is representative of Jordanian households with close to 16,000 households interviewed over the course of a year, from August 2017 to July 2018. We also use administrative and national accounts data from 2018, which broadly coincide with the timeframe of the household survey.

Income concepts and the values of taxes and transfers are reported in per capita Jordanian dinars per year. Per capita values are obtained by dividing total value by the total number of permanent household members. To calculate the indirect burden of indirect consumption taxes and of subsidies we use a 23 sector Input / Output (IO) table from 2010 uprated to 2016.<sup>16</sup>

## Income concepts before and after fiscal interventions

A CEQ assessment uses eight different income concepts starting from ‘pre-fiscal’ or ‘market income’; that is, the income before all fiscal interventions (see Lustig, 2018). This includes all incomes from work (salaries and self-employed income), capital, self-provision of goods and services, remittances and other

> 15 Government employees recruited before 1995 are in the Civil Pension system and armed forces members recruited before 2002 are in the Military Pension system, both of which are being phased out.

> 16 Constructed in Refaqat _et al_ . (2020).