Income redistribution and the role of tax-benefit systems in Latin America

The Instituto de Altos Estudios Nacionales (IAEN) and UNU-WIDER, in collaboration with the EUROMOD team at the Institute for Social and Economic Research (ISER) at the University of Essex will organize an international conference on income redistribution and the role of tax-benefit systems in Latin America, on 5-6 July 2018, in Quito, Ecuador.

The conference aims to provide a space for discussion between academics and policy makers about the effect of tax-benefit systems on income redistribution in Ecuador and other Latin American countries. The focus is to share knowledge about the most recent research on the role of tax-benefit systems in reducing income inequality and poverty, in particular work using ECUAMOD and other microsimulation models. It is important to create a link between academics and policy makers on recent tools and methods used to assess the role of tax-benefit policies on income inequality and poverty and the use of this tool for ex ante policy evaluation.

The keynote will be delivered by Professor Olivier Bargain (University of Bordeaux and Institut Universitaire de France). The conference will have parallel sessions with contributed papers and it will also feature a policy round table discussion on ’El rol de los impuestos y las transferencias monetarias en la reducción de la pobreza y desigualdad en Ecuador’, with the following panelists:

• Andrés Mideros, former General Secretary of the Presidency of Ecuador
• Diana Arias, Secretaría Nacional de Planificación y Desarrollo, Ecuador
• Reinaldo Cervantes, Director of Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Censos
• José Ramírez, Professor of Economics, Escuela Politécnica Nacional
• Marcelo Varela, Decano del Centro de Economía Pública y Sectores Estratégicos, Instituto de Altos Estudios Nacionales

The conference is part of the activities in the SOUTHMOD project in which tax-benefit microsimulation models for selected developing countries were built. ECUAMOD — the tax-benefit microsimulation model for Ecuador — has been developed in collaboration with IAEN, UNU-WIDER, and the EUROMOD team at the Institute for Social and Economic Research (ISER) at the University of Essex. ECUAMOD and other microsimulation models developed in the framework of the SOUTHMOD model are freely accessible for non-commercial research. The conference will serve an opportunity to promote ECUAMOD as a tool for policy analysis by academics and policy makers.

The conference will seek papers studying the role of tax-benefit systems in Latin American countries.

The deadline for the call for papers is 6 April 2018.

Please find the event page in Spanish here.

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