Who benefits from public spending? Who bears the burden of taxation? How desirable is the distribution of net benefits from the operation of a tax-benefit system? This paper surveys basic concepts, methods, and modeling approaches commonly used to address these issues in the context of fiscal...

The difficulties faced by many developing countries in raising revenue from direct taxes have forced them to rely heavily on indirect taxes to finance development interventions. The purpose of this paper is to show how to identify socially desirable options for commodity taxation in the context...

"Developing countries face a host of macroeconomic challenges in the design and implementation of development strategies and policies. The importance of the underlying poverty and distributional issues creates a need for relevant and reliable ways of tracking the social impact of shocks and...

"The importance of distributional issues in policymaking creates a need for empirical tools to assess the social impact of economic shocks and policies. This paper reviews some of the modeling approaches that are currently in use at the World Bank and other international financial institutions....