The European Union has improved living standards, yet welfare disparities persist across regions, countries, and demographic groups. This paper uses data from European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions cross-sectional and longitudinal surveys and the at-risk-of-poverty or social...

This paper assesses the impact of fiscal policy on the incidence, depth, and severity of poverty, and examines whether there is room for an increased role for fiscal policy in improving the wellbeing of the poor. The results show that the combined effect of taxes and social spending helped...

This paper proposes a new measure of growth in shared prosperity, based on shifts in population shares of different income groups over time. This measure complements the definition of shared prosperity recently proposed by the World Bank in which income growth of the bottom 40 percent is...

The paper examines the link between poverty, the middle class and institutional outcomes using a new cross-country panel dataset on the distribution of income and expenditure. It uses an econometric methodology to gauge whether a larger middle class has a causal effect on policy and...

This paper analyzes the impact of large-scale expansion of biofuels on the global income distribution and poverty. A global computable general equilibrium model is used to simulate the effects of the expansion of biofuels on resource allocation, commodity prices, factor prices and household...

The state of Bahia, Brazil has made progress in reducing poverty and improving social indicators in the past decade. Despite this progress, Bahia's poverty is among the highest and its social indicators are among the lowest in Brazil. Currently, 41 percent of Bahia's population live in...

The adoption of the shared prosperity goal by the World Bank in 2013 and Sustainable Development Goal 10, on inequality, by the United Nations in 2015 should strengthen the focus of development interventions and cooperation on the income growth of the bottom 40 percent of the income distribution...

This study assesses the redistributive impact of fiscal policy––and its individual elements––in Zambia. Zambia's 2015 fiscal policy reduces inequality; the largest reduction is created by in-kind public service expenditures on education. However, fiscal policy also increases poverty in...

This paper describes the impact of fiscal policy on inequality and poverty, and examines recent policy changes and whether there is room for an increased role for fiscal policy in improving the well-being of the poor. Taxes and social spending reduced inequality in Croatia; however, once the...

This paper proposes a methodology to approximate individual income distribution dynamics using only time series data on aggregate moments of the income distribution. Under the assumption that individual incomes follow a lognormal autoregressive process, this paper shows that the evolution over...