This paper presents findings on the changing effectiveness of cash transfers and income taxes on inequality and poverty reduction in four EU countries - the UK, Italy, Sweden and France. We use long time series (spanning four decades) to examine trends within countries over time and between...

The government is rightly concerned with employment generation to make growth inclusive. The use of the open unemployment rate to measure its success, however, is misplaced. In a developing country with a large informal sector and in the absence of unemployment insurance, open unemployment is...

On the presumption that poorer people tend to work less, it is often claimed that standard measures of inequality and poverty are overestimates. The paper points to a number of reasons to question this claim. It is shown that, while the labor supplies of American adults have a positive income...

Summary Effective from 2005, benefits for long-term unemployed have been reduced in Germany to the level of social assistance. This measure reflects the view that “all who are able to work, should work” - a view which makes sense only if the government can distinguish the disabled from the...

This paper focuses on measuring the extent to which publicly subsidized transfers in Latin America and the Caribbean redistribute income. The redistributive power of 56 transfers in eight countries is measured by their simulated impacts on poverty and inequality, and by their distributional...

In Peru, a country with an astonishing variety of different ecological areas, with 84 different climate zones and landscapes, with rainforests, high mountain ranges and dry deserts, the geographical context may not be all that matters, but it could be very significant in explaining regional...