Nora Lustig

I am Professor, Office of the President, at El Colegio de México, and Professor Emerita and founding Director of the Commitment to Equity Institute at Tulane University, where I held the Samuel Z. Stone Professorship of Latin American Economics.

My career combines research, teaching, institutional leadership, and policy engagement. After I received my PhD in Economics from the University of California, Berkeley, I have served as Professor, Center for Economic Studies, at El Colegio de México, Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, President of Universidad de las Américas Puebla, Senior Advisor and Head of the Poverty and Inequality Unit at the Inter-American Development Bank, Director of the Poverty Group at the United Nations Development Programme, and Shapiro Visiting Professor of International Affairs at George Washington University. I am currently a nonresident fellow at the Brookings Institution, the Center for Global Development, the Georgetown Americas Institute, the Inter-American Dialogue, the Paris School of Economics, and the Stone Center of Socioeconomic Inequalities at CUNY.

My research focuses on income distribution in Latin America and on the redistributive impact of fiscal policy in low- and middle-income countries. I am the author of approximately 80 academic articles and 20 books, and my work has achieved broad international recognition: I rank among the top 5 percent of most-cited economists registered in RePEc, and I have close to 19,000 citations in Google Scholar. Recent publications include "Inequality Bands: Seventy-Five Years of Measuring Income Inequality in Latin America," with Facundo Alvaredo, François Bourguignon, and Francisco Ferreira (Oxford Open Economics, 2025) and the Commitment to Equity Handbook: Estimating the Impact of Fiscal Policy on Inequality and Poverty (Brookings Institution Press, 2022), a methodological guide to assessing the impact of taxation and social spending on inequality and poverty in developing countries.

As a teacher and mentor, I have trained new generations of researchers, many of whom have participated in my projects and coauthored publications with me.

At Tulane, I consolidated an international research agenda on inequality, applying fiscal incidence analysis in more than 60 countries. I founded the Commitment to Equity Institute and its Data Center—the most comprehensive database on the redistributive impact of fiscal policy—and raised more than US$8 million to support its development. My work has been recognized with the School of Liberal Arts Outstanding Research Award (2012), the Lawrence M. v. D. Schloss Prize for Excellence in Research (2016), and the Tulane University Innovation Award (2021). In addition, our fiscal redistribution indicator was adopted as SDG indicator 10.4.2 by the United Nations.

I have served as President of the Society for the Study of Economic Inequality (ECINEQ) and as a founding member and President of the Latin American and Caribbean Economic Association (LACEA), of which I am now President Emerita. I was co-director of the World Bank's World Development Report 2000/1, Attacking Poverty, and have served as a member of the Bank's Atkinson Commission on Global Poverty, the G20 Eminent Persons Group on Global Financial Governance, the OECD High-Level Expert Group on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress (successor to the Stiglitz–Sen–Fitoussi Commission), the WHO Commission on Macroeconomics and Health, and the World Economic Forum's Stewardship Board on Economic Growth and Social Inclusion. I am a member of the Mexican Academy of Sciences and currently co-chair the United Nations High-Level Expert Group on "Beyond GDP" and the Independent Commission for Equality with Fiscal Justice (CIJUF) in Mexico. At El Colegio de México, I am coordinating the preparation of a Handbook on Social Policy in Latin America.