Dr Laura Abramovsky

In this report, we focus on understanding the context for the Sanitation Marketing (SanMark) intervention and potential initial impacts, after its gradual development and roll-out to selected treatment areas in the Nigerian states of Ekiti and Enugu.

The simplest form of value added tax (VAT) – and the form often advocated by international organisations – is one with a broad base and a single (‘uniform’) rate. In practise, most countries exempt and/or apply lower VAT rates on certain categories of goods and services. In this note authors summarise the pros and cons of such ‘VAT rate differentiation’ that are highlighted in the economics and taxation literatures, paying particular attention to the applicability and relevance of each factor for low- and middle-income countries.

We provide evidence on how changes in the use of high-skilled workers (inventors) in a foreign location affect a firm's domestic use of the same type of worker. We exploit rich data that provide variation in the location of inventors within multinational firms across industries and countries to control for confounding firm–time and industry factors. We find that a 10% increase in the use of foreign inventors leads to a 1.9% increase in the use of domestic inventors. Our results suggest that foreign and domestic inventors are complementary in the production of knowledge.

Many low-income countries face the hefty challenge of increasing sanitation coverage, in both rural and urban areas, which demand different solutions. In response, governments, with support from international agencies, bilateral donors and non-government organisations, are deploying a range of programmes and policies to accelerate progress towards the new global goals. Community-led total sanitation (CLTS) is one popular approach. CLTS works with an entire community to identify the negative effects of poor sanitation, especially the practice of open defecation, and empowers them to collectively find solutions. CLTS is understood to be more suitable for small, rural and homogeneous communities, however it is still considered an appropriate solution for more urbanised areas. In this brief, we provide quantitative evidence to support this conjecture and bring forward a simple rule of thumb that allows more efficient programme targeting. We suggest that using this information can improve the targeting of CLTS in Nigeria, and possibly other countries, freeing up scarce resources to identify and test complementary sanitation approaches suitable for more urbanised communities.

We evaluate the large-scale pilot program of an innovative and major welfare inter- vention in Colombia, which combines home visits by trained social workers to households in extreme poverty with preferential access to social programs.

We develop a tax micro-simulator model (MEXTAX) that can quantify the revenue and distributional impact of tax reforms in Mexico using micro-level data. We use MEXTAX to assess revenue-raising reforms to Mexico’s direct and indirect tax systems of 2010.

LATAX is a multi-country flexible tax micro-simulation model developed by researchers from the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) for the analysis of

This paper develops a tax micro-simulator model (MEXTAX) that can quantify the revenue and distributional impact of tax reforms in Mexico using micro-level data. The paper uses MEXTAX to assess revenue-raising reforms to Mexico’s direct and indirect tax systems of 2010.

This report, written in collaboration with Indepth Precision Consulting, Nigeria, presents a detailed description of the baseline data collected as part of the Formal Research Component of WaterAid UK's Project “Sustainable Total Sanitation Nigeria -implementation, learning, research, and influence on practice and policy" (STS Nigeria), funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

This paper provides a novel portrait of firms engaging in the international use of inventors.