Price shocks and policy reforms
Presented by: Dr. Nanak Kakwani
Date of Presentation: 20 November 2009
Venue: Ortigas seminar room, University Library, De La Salle University
Government all over the world taxes and also subsidizes many items of consumption. The taxes are imposed in the form of custom duties and general sales tax (GST). These taxes provide much needed revenue to governments. It is also realized that the indirect taxes are regressive and hurt the poor proportionally more than the non-poor. To protect the poor from paying more taxes, government provide exemptions from custom duty and GST on items of consumption which are consumed proportionally more by the poor. In response to the international increase in prices of fuel and food many governments are undertaking tax and subsidy reforms from the view point of mitigating their adverse impacts on the poor. The main objective of this lecture is to provide a methodology which can help governments to make reforms in their taxation and subsidy systems. A case study based on Jordan data will be discussed.
About the author
Dr. Nanak Kakwani has been active in the field of economic research for the past 45 years. His vast volume of work is focused primarily on econometric theory, applied welfare economics, pro-poor growth, inequality and poverty, progressivity of taxation and equity, standard of living, and development economics. He was a former director of the International Poverty Centre (IPC) of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) with headquarters at Brasilia, Brazil. He served as a consultant to World Bank in Washington D.C., United Nations Development Program (UNDP) and Asian Development Bank (ADB) in Manila and Bangkok and UK Department for International Development (DFID). He was likewise a former senior fellow at the World Institute for Development Economics Research (WIDER) based in Helsinki, Finland. He taught economics at the School of Economics in University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Australia from 1970 to 2000. He also had been a visiting professor at several universities including Delhi School of Economics in Delhi, India, University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand, Queen’s University in Canada and Wayne State University in the United States. He is currently a steering committee member of the Poverty and Economic Policy (PEP) Network under which the Community-based Monitoring System (CBMS) is a subprogram and a visiting research fellow at the Philippine Institute for Development Studies (PIDS).