This paper has the goal of presenting the first comprehensive update of poverty, inequality and shared prosperity trends – and key drivers of these trends – since 2003 until 2015, that is starting with the end of the most recent poverty assessment published in 2004 and that covered the...

Second quarter gross domestic product (GDP) estimates and high-frequency indicators suggest continued weakness in the economy even before the latest round of economic sanctions introduced by the European Union (EU), the United States (U.S.), and other countries in late July. The World Bank...

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...

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...

Do regions with higher working age populations grow faster? This paper examines this question using data from Russian regions and finds evidence that demographic trends influence regional growth convergence. In other words, keeping other factors constant, poorer regions grow faster than richer...

Using household data from the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey, this paper assesses how aging affects saving. To overcome a systematic bias against the life-cycle hypothesis of survey data, the paper estimates how the age profile of saving changes when the micro data are corrected to...

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...

This study compares the distributional impacts of the main tax and social spending programs in eight countries of the former Soviet Union (Armenia, Belarus, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, the Russian Federation, Tajikistan, and Ukraine) by applying a state-of-the-art fiscal incidence analysis...

This study compares the distributional impacts of the main tax and social spending programs in eight countries of the former Soviet Union (Armenia, Belarus, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, the Russian Federation, Tajikistan, and Ukraine) by applying a state-of-the-art fiscal incidence analysis...

This note provides an update of recent poverty and shared prosperity dynamics, and some of the underlying drivers, as well as introducing the new international poverty thresholds that are currently in use. The purpose of the update is to take advantage of the release of Household Budget Survey...