Nora Lustig

Nora Lustig is Samuel Z. Stone Professor of Latin American Economics and the founding Director of the Commitment to Equity Institute (CEQ) at Tulane University. She is also a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, the Center for Global Development and the Inter-American Dialogue. Professor Lustig’s research is on economic development, inequality and social policies with emphasis on Latin America. Among her recent publications, the Commitment to Equity Handbook: Estimating the Impact of Fiscal Policy on Inequality and Poverty is a step-by-step guide to assessing the impact of taxation and social spending on inequality and poverty in developing countries. Prof. Lustig is a founding member and President Emeritus of the Latin American and Caribbean Economic Association (LACEA) and was a co-director of the World Bank’s World Development Report 2000, Attacking Poverty. She serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Economic Inequality and is a member of the Society for the Study of Economic Inequality’s Executive Council. Prof. Lustig served on the Atkinson Commission on Poverty, the High-level Group on Measuring Economic Performance and Social Progress, and the G20 Eminent Persons Group on Global Financial Governance. She received her doctorate in Economics from the University of California, Berkeley.

The Commitment to Equity handbook (2^nd edition), edited by our own Nora Lustig, has just been published. It is a unique manual on the theory and practical methods for determining the impact of taxation and public spending on inequality and poverty. In Volume 1 - Fiscal Incidence Analysis: Methodology, Implementation, and Applications, policymakers, social planners, and economists are provided with a step-by-step guide to applying fiscal incidence analysis illustrated by country studies as well as the required software and a comprehensive set of key indicators and data housed in the CEQ Data Center on Fiscal Redistribution. Volume 2 - Methodological Frontiers in Fiscal Incidence Analysis includes a collection of chapters on alternative approaches to value in-kind education and health services; alternative methods to evaluate spending on infrastructure; corporate taxes and taxation on capital incomes; the redistributive consequences of social insurance pensions; the sustainability of fiscal redistribution; and, political economy of redistributive fiscal policy.