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...

The aim of this paper is to explain why poverty and material deprivation in South Africa are significantly higher among those of African descent than among whites. To do so, we estimate the conditional levels of poverty and deprivation Africans would experience had they the same characteristics...

Differences in individual wealth holdings are widely viewed as a driving force of economic inequality. However, as this finding relies on cross-section data, we may confuse older with wealthier. We propose a new method to adjust for age effects in cross-sections, which eliminates transitory...

The paper develops a concept and a measure of the monetary capacity of a country to reduce its own poverty and shows how these tools can be used to guide budget allocations or the distribution of Aid. We call this concept the income lever and define it as the relation between the welfare of the...

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...

The transitional economies of the Former Soviet Union (FSU) have enjoyed an extraordinary period of growth and poverty reduction between 2000 and 2007 and this occurred in concomitance with significant increases in private and public transfers to households. The paper assesses the relative...

In this paper we apply the methodology developed by García-Fernández and Palacios-González (2008,2009) based on multiresolution analysis, to the measurement of polarization to Israeli income data over the past decade. This methodology allows us, in contrast to other polarization measures, to...

The aim of this paper is twofold: a) To explore the evolution of occupational segregation of women and men of different racial/ethnic groups in the U.S. during the period 1940-2010; and b) to assess the consequences of segregation for each of them. For that purpose, this paper proposes a simple...

This paper provides a unique analysis of the evolution of gender and racial occupational segregation in Brazil from 1987-2006. Drawing on a novel dataset, constructed by harmonizing national household data over twenty years, the paper provides extensive new insights in the nature and evolution...

This paper proposes an index that quantifies the well-being (ill-being) of a target group as associated with its occupational segregation: that is, it assesses the gains/losses of that group which are derived from its underrepresentation in some occupations and overrepresentation in others. This...