General government spending as share of GDP, excluding transfers already captured under fiscal.transfer_expansion to avoid double-counting.
Size of cash and near-cash transfer programmes (unemployment benefits, means-tested assistance, universal child benefits). Architecturally distinct from forced-saving schemes — see condition welfare_architecture.
Progressivity of the personal income tax schedule, including top marginal rates, bracket spread, and targeted credits (EITC-equivalents).
Product-market regulation, entry barriers, licensing burdens, network-industry regulation, price controls.
Portugal's standard VAT (IVA) rate rise from 19% to 21%, enacted by the Socrates PS government in Decree-Law 192/2005 of 7 November 2005, was the headline measure in the corrective EU excessive-deficit programme that followed the 2005 reclassification of the deficit at 6.8% of GDP. The intended effect was to deliver an immediate ~0.7% of GDP in revenue, demonstrate the new socialist government's commitment to Stability and Growth Pact targets, and underwrite the wider Programa de Estabilidade e Crescimento public-administration consolidation programme.
Per invariant 3, reforms are scored by what they did on each channel-separated axis, not by the party that enacted them. This fingerprint is how the policy-match engine finds historical analogues.
Explicit links are curated by the author. Inferred links are hypotheses in the library that test the same axes this policy moved — the framework's answer to "what does the data say about a policy like this?".
Ranked by axis-fingerprint overlap with this policy. Direction match bolded — those are the closest historical analogues. Shape of the match is what drives policy-outcome comparison, not the country or party label.