Events

The Distributional Impacts of Taxes and Transfers

September 18, 2017

Washington, DC

OVERVIEW
AGENDA
SPEAKERS

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.
Chair
Carolina Sanchez Paramo, Senior Director, Poverty and Equity Global Practice, The World Bank
Introduction
Nora Lustig, Samuel Z. Stone Professor of Latin American Economics and Director of Commitment to Equity Institute, Tulane University
Gabriela Inchauste, Lead Economist, Poverty and Equity Global Practice, The World Bank
Armenia
Teresa Daban, Former Resident Representative to Armenia, International Monetary Fund
Ethiopia
Tassew Woldehanna, Professor of Economics and Vice President for Research and Technology Transfer at Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia
Indonesia
Luky Alfirman, Assistant Minister of Finance for State Revenue Policy, Government of Indonesia
Africa Region
Christine Dieterich, International Monetary Fund
Nora Lustig

Samuel Z. Stone Professor of Latin American Economics and Director of the CEQ Institute, Tulane University
Nora Lustig is Samuel Z. Stone Professor of Latin American Economics and director of the CEQ Institute at Tulane University. She is also a nonresident fellow at the Center for Global Development and the Inter-American Dialogue. Her current research focuses on assessing the impact of taxation and social spending on inequality and poverty in developing countries and on the determinants of income distribution in Latin America. She is a founding member and past president of the Latin American and Caribbean Economic Association (LACEA) and was a codirector of the World Bank’s World Development Report 2000/2001: Attacking Poverty. She is the editor of the Journal of Economic Inequality’s Forum. In addition, she is a coprincipal investigator of the United Nations University World Institute for Development Economics Research (UNU-WIDER) project, “Inequality in the Giants,” and serves on the Atkinson Commission on Global Poverty as well as on the High-Level Group on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress. She received her doctorate in economics from the University of California, Berkeley.

Gabriela Inchauste

Lead Economist, The World Bank
Gabriela Inchauste is a Lead Economist in the Poverty and Equity Global Practice, where she focuses on Eastern Europe and Central Asia. In addition, she is the global lead on Fiscal and Social Policies for Poverty Reduction and Shared Prosperity, and in this role, she has been working on the distributional impact of fiscal policy and on ex ante analysis of the distributional impacts of policy reforms. Before joining the Bank, she worked at the Inter-American Development Bank and the International Monetary Fund. She holds a doctorate in economics from the University of Texas at Austin.

Teresa Daban

Resident Representative, International Monetary Fund (IMF)
Teresa Dabán, was the Resident Representative of the International Monetary Fund to Armenia during August 2013-August 2017. At present she is the Senior Desk for Pakistan. She has been proposed by the Fund to become the new IMF Resident Representative to Pakistan starting in April next year. Before that she worked at the Fund as Senior Desk in several Emerging Markets economies in Latin America and Asia and in numerous Low Income Countries in Africa. She has also participated or led Fund technical assistance missions on fiscal transparency and public financial management to several countries in Central America, Africa, and Europe. Prior to joining the Fund in 2000, she served for eight years as an advisor in the Spanish Ministry of Finance with the main duty of preparing analytical policy papers to support the formulation of key national and EU-related budget and planning documents. Teresa holds a Master degree on monetary and financial economy from the CEMFI in Madrid and an MSc on Econometrics and Mathematical Economics from the L.S.E. in London.

Tassew Woldehanna

Professor of Economics and Vice President for Research and Technology Transfer, Addis Ababa University
Tassew Woldehanna is professor of economics and vice president for research and technology transfer at Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia. His interests include child welfare and poverty, employment, micro and small-scale enterprise development, entrepreneurship, and food security. He has published several book chapters and articles on areas of poverty, education, and health. Currently, he is principal investigator of Young Lives, an international study of childhood poverty following 12,000 children in four countries (Ethiopia, India, Peru, and Vietnam) based at the University of Oxford’s Department of International Development. He obtained his doctorate in household economics from Wageningen University, the Netherlands.

Luky Alfirman

Assistant Minister of Finance for State Revenue Policy
Luky Alfirman has just recently been appointed as Assistant Minister of Finance for State Revenue Policy. His responsibilities include to advise Minister of Finance on policy issues around tax revenue, including income tax, VAT, excise tax, and non-tax revenue, including natural resource royalty, SOE dividends, and other policies such as tariff, tax incentives, etc. He has been working for the Indonesian Ministry of Finance for more than 20 years with extensive and wide-ranging career. He has held various positions in different units. His previous position was the chief of staff for Minister of Finance for 2 years. Before, he worked for Fiscal Policy Agency as the Director of Macroeconomic Policy Center and the Director of State Budget Policy consecutively. His early career was mostly spent in Directorate General of Taxes, where he has a wide range of work experience in policy-making at headquarters, as well as operational experience in field offices. He holds a PhD in economics from the University of Colorado, Boulder, USA, focusing on public finance. He has participated and spoken in various international seminars and trainings on public policy, economics and public finance, including taxation.

Christine Dieterich

Deputy Division Chief, IMF African Department
Christine Dieterich is Deputy Division Chief at the IMF’s African Department where she also serves as coordinator for the department’s fiscal network. She has a wide range of country experience, but has worked over the last five years as mission chief in Western and Southern Africa. Her research interests include fiscal policy, in particular tax policy. Prior to joining the IMF, she worked with the German Ministry of Finance as economist on international financial institutions and with PricewaterhouseCoopers. She has a master’s degree from Tuebingen University, Germany.