CEQ Institute partners with WID.world

Nora Lustig’s visit to the Paris School of Economics in May and June 2017, and her discussions with Professor Thomas Piketty and his colleagues, resulted in a new partnership between the CEQ Institute and the WID.world project to produce Distributional National Accounts (DINA) in a number of low and middle income countries. With this partnership, we will join forces to enlarge the geographical coverage of countries with DINA and enhance both projects’ ability to reach out to increasingly broader audiences. For the CEQ Institute, this is a unique opportunity to assess how country-specific results might be affected when primary incomes, taxes and public spending are scaled up to match their values in the country’s National Accounts.  The partnership will also allow us to identify the data challenges that are particular to low and middle income countries, and suggest ways in which they could be overcome. We shall be able to assess further whether more progressive income and wealth taxes could be transformed into benefits -in cash and in kind- for the poorest.