The reduction of poverty, and more recently inequality, are pressing concerns in many low- and middle-income countries, not in the least as a result of the Sustainable Development Goals committing countries to significant improvements by 2030. Redistribution is important for reaching these...

This paper assesses the feasibility of simulating the distributional impacts produced by various tax and transfer instruments in Viet Nam. Viet Nam's system of tax and transfer policies underwent frequent changes, in terms of diversity and adjustment scope. The most important source of data is...

This paper presents an analysis of the recent evolution of social assistance in the developing world, looking at its complex typological configuration, which has interlinked with, and partly reflects the complex demographic and epidemiological transitions and rapid urbanization and economic...

This paper analyses the impacts of indirect tax policy reforms on income distribution and poverty in Tanzania by applying a standard static microsimulation model TAZMOD v1.8. The simulations model two indirect tax reforms involving changes to the excise duty and value-added tax rates on...

How does the public provision of education and the deployment of distortionary tax and subsidy instruments differ when the government's objective is conventional welfarist compared to when the objective is the non-welfarist one of equality of opportunity? This paper develops a framework in which...

This paper assesses the effects on poverty and inequality of the alternative targeting approaches that Zambia's Social Cash Transfer programme could take as its expansion continues during the period of the country's Seventh National Development Plan (2017-21). It further assesses the domestic...

The conventional justification for moving from income distribution to intergenerational mobility analysis is that the movie encompasses the snapshot and is normatively superior as the basis for assessing policy. Such a perspective underpins many an argument for shifting the focus from income...

We conduct an incentive-theoretical analysis of political economy considerations in the design of social protection programmes in developing countries to accompany economic reforms. We focus on two aspects of social protection - the provision of redistribution and retraining - that arguably...

One key element in the reduction of poverty and (in Latin America) inequality has been the achievement of greater fiscal equity; we analyse one key part of this process, which is the earmarking of portions of tax revenue to be spent on progressive public expenditures such as social protection,...

This paper re-examines the determinants and consequences of redistribution in light of improved data and methods relative to earlier literature. In particular, we use the latest version of the UNU-WIDER' Income Inequality Database to have the best available estimates of both pre- and...