Despite the obvious positive health impacts of tobacco taxation, an argument raised against it is that poor households bear the burden of the increased prices because of their higher share of spending on tobacco. This note includes estimates of the distributional impacts of price rises on...

Consumption of food away from home is rapidly growing across the developing world. Surprisingly, the majority of household surveys around the world haven not kept up with its pace and still collect limited information on it. The implications for poverty and inequality measurement are far from...

This paper evaluates the global welfare consequences of increases in mortality and poverty generated by the Covid-19 pandemic. Increases in mortality are measured in terms of the number of years of life lost (LY) to the pandemic. Additional years spent in poverty (PY) are conservatively...

There is growing support for the idea that global income poverty should be assessed with a measure accounting for both own income and relative income. The trade-off that such a measure makes between own income and relative income is the key question. Non-paternalism requires that this trade-off...

This paper studies the optimal taxation of bequests in a model in which agents have heterogeneous preferences over their consumption and the net-of-tax bequest received by their heir. The bequest left by an individual depends on both her degree of altruism and the bequest received from her...

This paper reviews the debate opposing the absolute and relative approaches to monetary poverty measurement. The arguments for combining both approaches into a single "overall” monetary poverty measure are introduced. The most salient proposals of hybrid poverty lines are presented. Then, the...

Simple welfare indices such as mean income are ubiquitous but not distribution sensitive. In contrast, existing distribution sensitive welfare indices are rarely used, often because they are difficult to explain and/or lack intuitive units. This paper proposes a simple new distribution sensitive...