Despite the well-known positive impact of tobacco taxes on health outcomes, policy makers hesitate to use them because of their possible regressive effect, that is, poorer deciles are proportionally more negatively affected than richer ones. Using an extended cost-benefit analysis to estimate...

Can consumption taxes reduce inequality in developing countries? This paper combines household expenditure data from 31 countries with theory to shed new light on the redistributive potential and optimal design of consumption taxes. It uses the place of purchase of each expenditure to proxy for...

This paper analyzes the welfare and distributional impacts of increasing taxes on cigarettes in Georgia. Increasing taxes on tobacco is an effective measure to reduce smoking. According to some estimates, increasing tobacco taxes could save more than GEL 3.6 billion and 53 thousand lives over a...

Colombia has reduced extreme poverty in the past 16 years by almost half, moderate poverty by 22 percentage points, and made more than four million Colombians jump the threshold of multidimensional poverty. However, it remains one of the most unequal countries in the region, after Brazil and...

This study assesses the redistributive effects of fiscal policy in Mali and Niger. Fiscal policy is poverty increasing in Mali (by 2.4 percentage points) and Niger (2.5 percentage points). This is a result of primarily two factors: indirect taxes (value-added taxes and import duties) and direct...

This paper uses Mongolia's Household Socio Economic Survey for 2016 to estimate the distributive impact of taxes and transfers. The findings show that the system is progressive and contributes to reductions in poverty and inequality. The Gini coefficient of the pre-tax-and-transfer income is...

Tobacco taxes have positive impacts on health outcomes. However, policy makers often hesitate to use them because of the perception that poorer households are affected disproportionally more than richer households. This study compares the simulated distributional effects of tobacco tax increases...