Working Paper
Income Distribution during the Transition in China
This paper's goal is to increase the understanding of the inequality trends during the transitional period in China. From 1978 to 1995, China has been undergoing 18 years far-reaching economic system reform and opening to the outside world nationwide...
Working Paper
Prospects for 'Pro-Poor' Growth in Africa
This paper examines trends in income distribution and its linkages to economic growth and poverty reduction in order to understand the prospects for achieving poverty reduction in Africa. We examine the levels and trends in income distribution in...
Working Paper
Fuel subsidies and income redistribution in Ecuador
This paper aims to evaluate the progressivity of different fuel subsidies in Ecuador as well as the budgetary and distributional effects of a potential elimination of such subsidies. Our analysis makes use of ECUAMOD, the tax-benefit microsimulation...
Working Paper
Employment and development in Asia
How have economic development, employment, and labour markets in Asian countries interacted since the publication of Myrdal’s Asian Drama? Myrdal rejected, the western approach to and definition of employment and emphasized the role of ‘informal’...
Working Paper
The Food Crisis in Africa
A large part of Africa is chronically affected by a severe food crisis which threatens the food security of many of her inhabitants. A peculiarity of this continent is that food production is not only a source of food but also a source of incomes for...
Working Paper
Microsimulation analysis of the impact of indirect tax benefits on income distribution and poverty alleviation in Tanzania
This paper analyses the impacts of indirect tax policy reforms on income distribution and poverty in Tanzania by applying a standard static microsimulation model TAZMOD v1.8. The simulations model two indirect tax reforms involving changes to the...
Working Paper
Relative Deprivation, Personal Income Satisfaction, and Average Well-Being under Different Income Distributions
This paper uses the data gained from an income categorization experiment for five shapes of income distributions to investigate background context effects, relative deprivation, range-frequency theory to explain background context effects, individual...
Working Paper
Measuring Inequality Without the Pigou-Dalton Condition
Typical welfare and inequality measures are required to be Lorenz consistent which guarantees that inequality decreases and welfare increases as a result of a progressive transfer. We explore the implications for welfare and inequality measurement of...
Working Paper
Welfare dynamics in India over a quarter-century
We analyse the Indian National Sample Survey data spanning the period 1987/88–2011/12 to uncover patterns of transition into and out of different classes of consumption distribution. At the aggregate level, income growth has accelerated, accompanied...
Working Paper
Regional Poverty and Income Inequality in Central and Eastern Europe
This paper reports levels of income inequality and poverty in four Central and Eastern European countries: the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Russia. Unlike many previous researchers who examine transition economies, we aggregate the detailed...
Working Paper
Taking stock of South African income inequality
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...
Working Paper
Who Pays Indirect Taxes in Russia?
The interplay of a differentiated indirect tax structure and the variation in expenditure patterns across households, leads to a possibly unequal distribution of indirect tax liabilities across the population. This paper uses the ninth round of the...
Working Paper
Regional Output Differences in International Perspective
Accurate regional estimates of output are desired as an indicator of level of development and as a variable used to explain internal migration, demand patterns, fertility and other aspects of behaviour. This chapter explores one often neglected...
Working Paper
Poverty and Growth in the WAEMU after the 1994 Devaluation
This paper brings out that poverty increased massively in the wake of the 1994 devaluation of the CFA franc, despite a significant recovery of economic growth. Although this increase affected all the social groups, it fell mostly on the urban poor...
Working Paper
Urban-Rural Inequality in Living Standards in Africa
In this paper we examine the relative importance of rural versus urban areas in terms of monetary poverty and seven other related living standards indicators. We present the levels of urban-rural differences for several African countries for which we...