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.
“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
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.
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.
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.
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?