November 11, 2017
Universidad de San Andres, Buenos Aires, Argentina
Nora Lustig participated as a discussant.
Presentation:
“Redistribution and Poverty Reduction: Do Political Regimes Matter?,”by Nora Lustig. Presented at LACEA-President’s Panel on Populism, Universidad de San Andres, Buenos Aires, Argentina. November 10, 2017.
November 9-11, 2017
Universidad de San Andres, Buenos Aires, Argentina
Nora Lustig presented at Latin American and Caribbean Economic Association (LACEA) and the Latin American Econometric Society (LAMES) annual meetings, hosted by the Universidad de San Andres at the Hotel Intercontinental.
Presentations:
“Fiscal Policy, Inequality and Poverty: Methodological Innovations & New Results,” by Nora Lustig. Presented at LACEA-LAMES, Universidad de San Andres, Buenos Aires, Argentina. November 9, 2017.
“Top Incomes, Issues with Survey Data, and Inequality: Evidence from Simulations and Linked Income and Tax Return Data,” by Nora Lustig and Sean Higgins. Presented at LACEA-LAMES, Universidad de San Andres, Buenos Aires, Argentina. November 9, 2017.
“Methodological Innovations in Fiscal Incidence Analysis and Overview of Results,” by Nora Lustig. Presented at LACEA-LAMES, Universidad de San Andres, Buenos Aires, Argentina. November 9, 2017.
Program Overview
November 7-8, 2017
Universidad de San Andres, Buenos Aires, Argentina
Nora Lustig presented at the Universidad de San Andres as part of the CEQ Handbook 2020 Workshop. Click here to view workshop agenda.
Presentations:
“Towards a Taxonomy of the ‘Missing Rich Problem,” by Nora Lustig. Presented at CEQ Handbook 2020 Workshop, Universidad de San Andres, Buenos Aires. Argentina. November 7-8, 2017
“Top Incomes, Issues with Survey Data, and Inequality: Evidence from Simulations and Linked Income and Tax Return Data,” by Nora Lustig and Sean Higgins. Presented at CEQ Handbook 2020 Workshop, Universidad de San Andres, Buenos Aires, Argentina. November 7-8, 2017.
September 18, 2017
The World Bank, Washington, D.C., USA
The event will launch a new book—The Distributional Impact of Taxes and Transfers: Evidence from Eight Developing Countries—that provides an assessment of the effects of taxation and public expenditures on the income of different households, individuals, and socioeconomic groups as well as the distribution of income across the entire population and their impact on poverty and inequality.
The event will begin with a short introduction by the co-authors—Gabriela Inchauste, a lead economist in the Poverty and Equity Global Practice of the World Bank Group and Nora Lustig, Director of Commitment to Equity (CEQi), Tulane University. The event will also include a panel of experts that will discuss the longer-term impacts of the work, including the initial reception of the work, the extent to which there was a country dialogue and whether that led to policy changes in the longer run. The panel will also look at some more recent case studies where the analysis has helped to shape the policy dialogue.
Related Links:
Video Recording
Publication Page
Publication
World Bank Video: How Tax and Spending Policies Can Reduce Poverty and Inequality
Blog Post: World Bank – Let’s Talk Development: “How do taxes and transfers impact poverty and inequality in developing countries?”
September 1, 2017
Ministerio de Hacienda, Asunción, Paraguay
Nora Lustig presented at Paraguay’s Ministry of Finance.
Related Links:
“Política Fiscal, Desigualdad y Pobreza: Paraguay en un Contexto Comparativo,” by Nora Lustig. Ministerio de Hacienda, Paraguay. Asunción, Paraguay. September 1, 2017.
“Política Fiscal, Desigualdad y Pobreza en Países de Ingresos Bajos y Medios,” by Nora Lustig. Ministerio de Hacienda, Paraguay. Asunción, Paraguay. September 1, 2017.
August 19-20, 2017
Guangzhou, China
Nora Lustig and Ali Enami presented at the IPP International Conference “Development and Poverty: China and the World.” The conference was held in Guangzhou, China and organized by the Institute of Public Policy of South China University of Technology in cooperation with UNESCO.
The conference featured speakers and participants from the West, East Asia, South Asia, Latin America, and mainland China to discuss challenges faced by countries in their global development and poverty reduction initiative. The conference aims to deepen the understanding of the issue of poverty alleviation through analyses of poverty governance experience in China, and around the world.
Presentation:
“Deconstructing the Decline in Inequality in Latin America,” by Nora Lustig. Presented via videoconference at The 2017 IPP International Conference, Guangzhou, China. August 19, 2017.
July 17-19, 2017
New York, USA
Nora Lustig presented at the Seventh Meeting of the Society for the Study of Economic Inequality (ECINEQ). The Stone Center on Socio-Economic Inequality at CUNY served as host of ECINEQ. ECINEQ conferences are held biennially; the 2017 meeting was the first one ever convened in the United States. The three-day event took place at the Graduate Center and was attended by over 250 inequality scholars from more than 30 countries.
Presentations:
“Fiscal Policy, Inequality, and Poverty in Iran: Assessing the Impact and Effectiveness of Taxes and Transfers,” by Ali Enami, Nora Lustig and Alireza Taqdiri. Presented at 7th ECINEQ Meeting, City University of New York, New York, United States. July 18, 2017
“Fiscal Policy, Inequality and Poverty in Low and Middle-Income Countries,” by Nora Lustig. Presented at 7th ECINEQ Meeting, City University of New York, New York, United States. July 19, 2017.
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.
Professor Tassew Woldehanna ( a member of CEQ’s Ethiopia team) of Addis Ababa University provided insights on CEQ’s impact in Ethiopia.
From your experience as a user of the CEQ tool, what did you find most useful and what should be improved?
TW: The CEQ is a very useful tool to assess how poor households are affected by taxes and transfers. It would be useful to incorporate how the poor benefit from investment in infrastructure such as rural roads, water and sanitation, and so on. In Ethiopia, the government spends a significant portion of the budget on infrastructure and this is not accounted for in the current CEQ method.
The CEQ Assessment for Ethiopia was led by the World Bank who had direct interaction with the government. Did the results lead to any noteworthy policy change?
TW: Yes, definitely. The CEQ Assessment showed that the extreme poor were often paying taxes over and above what they received in transfers (Chapter 5, World Bank Group. 2015. Ethiopia Poverty Assessment 2014. Washington, DC. © World Bank). The fact that many poor were left worse off was a consequence of two factors: the threshold of income at which people were liable to start paying taxes was very low and the Productive Safety Net Program (PNSP)—our flagship cash transfer—was well-targeted but both the coverage and benefit per household were small. In January 2016, the government expanded the coverage of the PNSP to include households living in urban areas, among other things. In July 2016, the government raised the threshold of taxable personal income from Birr 150 to 750 birr per month and taxable business income from Birr 1800 to Birr 7500 per year. While these changes may not be enough to completely eliminate the problem, it has been an important policy change in the right direction.
