Transferring public benefits to people in no need of them appears to be a waste of public money. Thus, there seems to be support for a move away from universal child benefits and towards means testing. This study presents a critique of this overly-simplistic view and proposes a very simple...

The Gini index, a widely used economic inequality measure, is computed using data whose designs involve clustering and stratification, generally known as complex household surveys. Under complex household survey, we develop two novel procedures for estimating Gini index with a pre-specified...

We analyse the UK policy response to Covid-19 and its impact on household incomes, as of late April 2020, using microsimulation methods. We estimate that households will lose a substantial share of their net income (8% on average). The proportional losses are largest for higher-income families....

We synthesize the findings from several recent papers on South Africa's very high income inequality. These papers use new datasets—including income tax data—and new empirical methods to investigate the drivers of household income and individual earnings inequality in South Africa. Increased...

In this paper we explore the income data in two surveys that underpin a South African tax-benefit microsimulation model. The simulated taxes and benefits using each dataset are compared with each other and with administrative data for a common time point. We explore discrepancies between the...