The World Bank has partnered with the Commitment to Equity Institute at Tulane University to implement their diagnostic tool-the Commitment to Equity (CEQ) Assessment-designed to assess how taxation and public expenditures affect income inequality, poverty, and different economic groups. The...

Recent efforts at poverty alleviation emphasize increasing government spending on education. However, even if spending were perfectly targeted, it is not evident that spending by itself will lead to higher educational attainment. Bolivian household data is used in this paper to ascertain the...

This paper assesses the impact of fiscal policy on the incidence, depth, and severity of poverty, and examines whether there is room for an increased role for fiscal policy in improving the wellbeing of the poor. The results show that the combined effect of taxes and social spending helped...

This paper quantifies the contributions to poverty reduction observed in Sri Lanka between 2002 and 2012/13. The methods adopted for the analysis generate entire counterfactual distributions to account for the contributions of demographics, labor, and non-labor incomes in explaining poverty...

Demographics, labor income, public transfers, or remittances: Which factor contributes the most to observed reductions in poverty? Using counterfactual simulations, this paper accounts for the contribution labor income has made to the observed changes in poverty over the past decade for a set of...

As in high-income countries, reduced rates of VAT and VAT exemptions ("preferential VAT rates") are a common feature of indirect tax systems in LMICs. Many of the goods and services that are granted preferential rates - such as foodstuffs and kerosene - seem likely to receive such treatment on...