This technical assistance (TA) mission on Government Finance Statistics was conducted during April 19– May 6, 2022. The main purpose of the mission was to review the progress made by the authorities in implementing previous TA recommendations and provide further support to improve fiscal data compilation and dissemination in line with international standards set out in the Government Finance Statistics Manual 2014.
This paper presents a novel technique to measure and compare the redistributive capacity of observed tax (or transfer) policies. The technique is based on income distribution simulations and controls for differences in pre-tax income distributions. It assumes that the only information on the pre-tax distribution available in each country-year is the Gini coefficient and the mean (GDP per capita). We illustrate the technique with an application to the personal income tax, using a dataset of 108 countries over the 2007-2018 period.