Pia Rattenhuber is a Research Fellow at UNU-WIDER. She has previously worked for OECD (Department of Labour and Social Affairs), the German Ministry of Economics and the German Institute of Economic Research (DIW Berlin). She attained her PhD from Free University Berlin. Her works focuses on social protection systems, taxation and tax-benefit microsimulation models.
We examine the distributional effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and associated tax-benefit measures in seven sub-Saharan African countries, focusing on the onset of the crisis.We evaluate impacts on disposable incomes, considering variations across...
This study evaluates which type of benefit—a universal benefit, a proxy mean-tested benefit, or a categorical benefit— better cushions the poverty effects of income shocks in a developing economy. We compare the effectiveness of the three benefit...
We evaluate a major personal income tax reform in Uganda that came into effect in 2012–13, contributing to the scarce literature on the effects of personal income tax reform on employees’ income in a low-income country in Africa. The reform increased...
This report documents GHAMOD, the SOUTHMOD model developed for Ghana. The report describes the different tax-benefit policies in place, how the microsimulation model picks up these different provisions, and the database on which the model runs. It...
In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, several countries enacted tax and social protection measures to help mitigate the economic hardship faced by individuals and households. This experience underscores the need to better understand the impact of...
View the latest GHAMOD country report here. This report documents GHAMOD, the SOUTHMOD model developed for Ghana. The report describes the different tax-benefit policies in place, how the microsimulation model picks up these different provisions, and...
Low- and middle-income countries face a trade-off between raising tax revenue to strengthen social protection and creating incentives for the population to enter formal employment. However, empirical evidence on labour supply elasticities in the...
This technical note presents one of the modelling approaches used in Jara and Rattenhuber (2022) to estimate formal employment elasticities, namely the estimation of a discrete choice model of labour supply with informal employment. The approach...
The COVID-19 pandemic has shown that African tax and social-benefit systems are currently ill-equipped to protect households from sudden income losses...
The number of people living in poverty around the world is estimated to have increased by half a billion people due to the COVID-19 crisis. The...
How do crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic influence inequality and the other way around? This year’s UN Day Dresden put a spotlight on “Inequalities...
Join the network
