This paper provides an account of a South African tax-benefit microsimulation model - SAMOD - which has been developed for use by government over the past ten years. The two datasets that underpin the current version of SAMOD are introduced, and the model's tax and benefit policies are described...

This paper provides an account of a Nambian tax-benefit microsimulation model - NAMOD - which has been developed for use by government. Following a section on the importance of social security in Namibia and recent related studies, the paper outlines the tax-benefit policies that are included...

After three decades of persistently high income inequality, from 2001 Brazil experienced a downward inequality trend followed by rising household income growth. Both movements lasted until 2015. This work synthesizes the results of six papers, describing Brazilian income distribution trends and...

Behavioural economics highlights the role of social preferences in economic decisions. Further, populations are heterogeneous; suggesting that group composition may impact the ability to sustain voluntary public goods contributions. This parallels research in public economics where...

Does foreign aid promote aggregate economic growth? In contrast to widespread perceptions, academic studies of this question have been rapidly converging towards a positive answer. We employ a simulation approach to (i) validate the coherence of recent empirics and (ii) calculate plausible...

Traditional 'delta-change' approach of scenario generation for climate change impact assessment to water resources strongly depends on the selected base-case observed historical climate conditions that the climate shocks are to be super-imposed. This method disregards the combined effect of...

In this paper we explore South Africa's personal income tax system using two microsimulation models. The first, SAMOD, simulates personal income tax and social benefits using a dataset derived from the nationally representative National Income Dynamics Study survey. The second, PITMOD, simulates...

The quality of data on employment income is explored using Tanzanian and Zambian household survey datasets. The extent of missing and implausible income data is assessed and four different methods are applied to impute missing or implausible values. The four imputation methods are also applied...

This paper explores the impact of the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in South Africa on income poverty and inequality in South Africa. Using a static tax-benefit microsimulation model with input datasets that were adjusted to reflect people's earned incomes just before the pandemic (March...

With data from the World Bank Enterprise Survey, this paper examines how firm-level resilience capabilities interact with government support in the reduction of lay-offs among formal firms in Central America. We estimate two latent variables to approximate resilience-related capabilities before...