Publication

This paper argues that the existing tools used to determine whether the poor are helped or hurt by taxes and cash transfer systems, have a significant problem. Indeed, the authors contend that such tools, which compare income distributions before and after fiscal policy implementation, fail to reflect how a substantial proportion of the poor are made poorer by the tax and transfer system. They then provide a measure that they suggest does provide a way to compare the extent to which a policy will make people poorer or better off, before illustrating it using data from Brazil.