Guatemala is one of the most unequal countries in Latin America and has the highest incidence of poverty. The indigenous population is more than twice as likely of being poor than the nonindigenous group. Fiscal incidence analysis based on the 2009-2010 National Survey of Family Income and...

Recent evidence on the impact of the crisis on developed countries shows that the changes in income inequality and poverty have been relatively small in spite of the macroeconomic heterogeneity of the recession across different economies. However, when evaluating the main changes in individual...

We apply a standard tax and benefit incidence analysis to estimate the impact on inequality and poverty of direct taxes, indirect taxes and subsidies, and social spending (cash and food transfers and in-kind transfers in education and health). The extent of inequality reduction induced by direct...

Conventional wisdom states that fiscal policy redistributes little in Latin America. Lower tax revenues and – above all – lower and less progressive transfers have been identified as the main cause. Existing studies show that, while in Europe the distribution of all transfers combined (cash...

We model the dynamics of social assistance benefit receipt in Britain using data from the British Household Panel Survey, waves 1–15. First, we discuss definitions of social assistance benefit receipt, and present information about the trends between 1991 and 2005 in the receipt of social...

We review the literature on the links between inequality, growth and welfare. Three questions are addressed: 1) What is the impact of growth and development on inequality? 2) What is the impact of inequality on growth, development and welfare? 3) What is the impact of proequality public policies...

This paper introduces and analyses, both normatively and statistically, a new class of inequality measures. This class generalizes and comprises different well-known families of inequality measures as particular cases. The elements of this new class are obtained by weighting local inequality...

Taxes and transfers can have significant impacts on poverty and inequality. All standard measures are by definition anonymous in the sense that we do not know the identity of winners and losers. That a given combination of taxes and transfers makes some of the poor poorer, however, may be...

Between 2003 and 2009, Argentina’s social spending as a share of GDP increased by 7.6 percentage points. Marginal benefit incidence analysis for 2003, 2006, and 2009 suggests that the contribution of cash transfers to the reduction of disposable income inequality and poverty rose markedly...

The aim of this paper is to study the ex-ante effects of the implementation of a Non Contributory Pension (NCP) program in Colombia and Peru. Relying on household survey data, we simulate the potential impact of the transfer on poverty, inequality, fiscal cost, and the probability of affiliation...