André Decoster

André Decoster (Belgium, 1958) is full professor at the Faculty of Business and Economics of KU Leuven, where he teaches courses Principles of Economics, Public Finance, and Welfare, Inequality and Poverty. He received his PhD in economics from KU Leuven in 1988.

His research and publications broadly belong to ‘applied welfare analysis’. It concerns the construction and use of tax-benefit microsimulation models, with special focus on indirect taxes and labour supply; optimal taxation and the evaluation of tax reforms, with attention on how to measure individual welfare; and empirical analysis of changes in inequality and/or poverty, both at the national and international level. His research is mainly based on the empirical analysis of micro data: household budget surveys, household income surveys, and administrative data of social security registers or tax forms.

For many years he coordinated the Belgian national team in the European network of microsimulation which develops and maintains the EUROMOD-model, and was a founding member of the International Microsimulation Association. In 2015 he won the Belgian Taxman Award and the KU Leuven prize for research with broad societal impact. He is fellow of the World Wealth and Inequality Database network (at PSE in Paris), in the context of which he initiated the integration of a series of Belgian top income shares into the publicly available and internationally recognized database. Currently he leads the project BE-PARADIS (The Belgian Paradox of Inequality Studies) in which a renewed and profound inquiry of existing and available data, concepts, and methods on Belgian inequality should lead to insight into different drivers in the evolution of Belgian inequality, and to an alignment of Belgium with the international research agenda and its output in the form of DINA’s (Distributional National Accounts).

As a UNU-WIDER Non-Resident Senior Research Fellow, Professor Decoster is involved in the SOUTHMOD – simulating tax and benefit policies for development project.