CEQ: Commitment to Equity

CEQ: Commitment to Equity

http://cipr.tulane.edu/pages/detail/238/Commitment-to-EquityA Diagnostic Framework to Assess Governments’ Fiscal Policies

Director: Nora Lustig, Samuel Z. Stone Professor of Latin American Economics, Tulane University; and Non-resident Fellow, Center for Global Development and Inter-American Dialogue.

What is CEQ?

The Commitment to Equity (CEQ) project is designed to assess the progressivity of social spending and taxes, their impact on poverty reduction, and their redistributive effects. It does this through a comprehensive incidence analysis and a diagnostic framework. The incidence analysis addresses the following three questions: How much redistribution and poverty reduction does a country accomplish through social spending and taxes? How progressive are revenue collection and social spending? What could be done to further increase redistribution and improve re-distributional effectiveness? CEQ is the first framework to comprehensively assess the tax and benefits system in developing countries and to make the assessment comparable across countries and over time. Initially, CEQhas focused on Latin America.

The comprehensive incidence analysis measures how each component of the tax and benefit system is distributed and the overall impact of taxes and benefits on an array of poverty and inequality indicators. It also calculates effectiveness indicators, progressivity indicators, incidence by decile, coverage and leakages by program, and a probit analysis of the probability of remaining poor after direct transfers.

The diagnostic framework is designed to assess how aligned fiscal policies are with supporting a minimum living standard and human capital accumulation, as well as with reducing inequality. The objective is to evaluate efforts based on whether governments: i. collect and allocate enough resources to support a minimum living standard for all; ii. collect and distribute resources equitably; iii. ensure that spending is fiscally sustainable and that programs are of good quality and incentive compatible; iv. collect and publish relevant information, as well as are subject to independent evaluations.

Led by Nora Lustig and Peter Hakim CEQ/Latin America is a joint project of the Inter-American Dialogue (IAD) and Tulane University’s Center for Inter-American Policy and Research (CIPR) and Department of Economics. The project has received financial support from the Canadian International Development Agency, the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the United Nations Development Programme’s Regional Bureau for Latin America and the Caribbean, and the General Electric Foundation.

Working Papers

Click here to access the CEQ Handbook. Note this is a working paper.

Declining Inequality in Latin America in the 2000s: The Cases of Argentina, Brazil and Mexico
Nora Lustig, Luis F. Lopez-Calva and Eduardo Ortiz-Juarez
July 16, 2012

The Impact of Taxes and Social Spending on Inequality and Poverty in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Mexico and Peru: A Synthesis of Results
Nora Lustig, George Gray-Molina, Sean Higgins, Miguel Jaramillo, Wilson Jiménez, Veronica Paz, Claudiney Pereira, Carola Pessino, John Scott and Ernesto Yañez
Department of Economics Working Paper 1216 — August 2012

Social Spending, Taxes and Income Redistribution in Uruguay
Marisa Bucheli, Nora Lustig, Maximo Rossi and Florencia Amábile
August 31, 2012