Commitment to Equity Paper Series

Many governments try to reduce poverty and inequality through a mixture of taxes, transfers, and public services. Individual policies, such as taxation or cash transfers, are frequently evaluated on how well they address these goals. CGD nonresident fellow Nora Lustig’s Commitment to Equity project assesses overall impact of a country’s fiscal policy package on poverty and inequality

More from the Series

WORKING PAPER

The Impact of the Tax System and Social Expenditure on the Distribution of Income and Poverty in Latin America (Spanish) - Working Paper 450
Nora Lustig
March 21, 2017
Using standard fiscal incidence analysis and the new methodological developments by the Commitment to Equity (CEQ) Institute, this paper estimates the impact of fiscal policy on inequality and poverty in sixteen countries in Latin America around 2010.
WORKING PAPER

Fiscal Policy, Income Redistribution, and Poverty Reduction in Low- and Middle-Income Countries
Nora Lustig
January 30, 2017
Using comparative fiscal incidence analysis, this paper examines the impact of fiscal policy on inequality and poverty in twenty-nine low-and middle-income countries for circa the year 2010.
WORKING PAPER

The Impact of Taxes and Social Spending on Inequality and Poverty in El Salvador - Working Paper 447
Margarita Beneke et al.
January 03, 2017
We conducted a fiscal impact study to estimate the effect of taxes, social spending, and subsidies on inequality and poverty in El Salvador, using the methodology of the Commitment to Equity project. Taxes are progressive, but given their volume, their impact is limited. Direct transfers are concent...
WORKING PAPER

Analytic Foundations: Measuring the Redistributive Impact of Taxes and Transfers - Working Paper 446
Ali Enami et al.
January 03, 2017
This paper provides a theoretical foundation for analyzing the redistributive effect of taxes and transfers for the case in which the ranking of individuals by pre-fiscal income remains unchanged. We show that in a world with more than a single fiscal instrument, the simple rule that progressive tax...