This paper examines the extent and determinants of structural poverty dynamics in South Africa, focusing on the socio economically disadvantaged urban African population. The quantitative analysis using panel data is triangulated with evidence from a qualitative case study integrating focus...

Beyond the hopes placed in Africa's emergent middle class as an engine of economic growth, some analysts see this group as a bastion of political stability and enduring democratisation across the continent. This paper's approach differs from that of most studies, which treat the middle class as...

The paper employs the Commitment to Equity framework to present a first attempt at a comprehensive fiscal incidence analysis for Ukraine, encompassing the revenue and expenditures components of the fiscal system, including direct and indirect taxes, as well as direct, indirect, and in-kind...

This paper finds that informal workers are more likely to have inferior work conditions, but do not necessarily report worse subjective well-being. Starting with lower wages, but also with less regularity of hours and paid vacation, informal workers have higher incidence of envelope payments...

The purpose of this paper is to introduce applications of RUSMOD - a microsimulation model for fiscal incidence analysis in the Russian Federation. RUSMOD combines household survey micro-data and fiscal policy rules to simulate the Russian tax-benefit system: the size and distribution of taxes...

This paper examines the impact of the recent recession in Belarus on poverty and broader measures of household welfare and compares the recent recession episode to previous economic crises in Belarus. The paper constructs a measure of vulnerability to poverty, based on an estimated probability...

This paper uses methods developed by the Commitment to Equity Institute and data from the Household Budget Survey to assess the effects of government taxation and social spending on poverty and inequality in Moldova. The paper presents the first detailed distributional analysis of the tax and...

Despite the well-known positive effects of tobacco taxes on health outcomes, policy makers avoid relying on such taxes because of their possible regressive impact. Using an extended cost-benefit analysis to estimate the distributional effect of cigarettes in the Russian Federation, this paper...