This paper examines the distributional impacts of agricultural policies versus those of cash transfers using a tax-benefit microsimulation model for Zambia for the policy year 2020. The analysis also considers the behavioural impacts of input subsidies and social cash transfers. The results...

This paper examines the measurement of social welfare, poverty and inequality taking into account features that have been found to be important welfare determinants in behavioural economics. Most notably, we incorporate reference-dependence, loss aversion and diminishing sensitivity - aspects...

This paper analyses the effectiveness of tax-benefit systems in reducing poverty and inequality across 13 countries in the Global South. Using national survey data and tax-benefit microsimulation models from the SOUTHMOD project, we provide a cross-country perspective on the redistributive...

Ghana is relatively rare among Sub-Saharan African countries in having had sustained positive growth every year since the mid-1980s. This paper analyses the nature of the growth and then presents an analysis of the evolution of both consumption poverty and non-monetary poverty outcomes over this...

The adoption of the value-added tax has arguably been one of the most important tax policy measures worldwide, but is also one of the most heatedly debated. While some argue that the VAT has served as a useful tool to boost government revenue, others claim that it is also a regressive tax,...

How does the public provision of education and the deployment of distortionary tax and subsidy instruments differ when the government's objective is conventional welfarist compared to when the objective is the non-welfarist one of equality of opportunity? This paper develops a framework in which...

A common claim in the policy discourse is that a government wishing to achieve equality of opportunity should use public provision of education for equalisation of opportunities rather than income taxation, which only equalizes incomes. We develop a framework in which the tax and education...

An influential paper by Berg et al., 'Redistribution, inequality, and growth: new evidence', uses the SWIID data to examine the impact of inequality and redistribution on growth in both developing and developed countries. It finds that while inequality is harmful for growth, redistribution does...

This paper examines the measurement of social welfare, poverty and inequality taking into account reference-dependence, loss aversion and diminishing sensitivity - aspects emphasized in Prospect Theory - to social welfare measurement. We suggest a new notion of equivalent income, the income...

This paper examines the impact of the introduction of the value-added tax on inequality and government revenues using newly released macro data. We present both conventional county fixed effect regressions and instrumental variable analyses, where VAT adoption is instrumented using the previous...