Pierre Bachas

Economist, Development Economics

Pierre Bachas is an Economist in the Macroeconomics and Growth Team in the Development Research Group. His research focuses on public finance. His work uses mainly administrative data, in collaboration with tax administrations, to evaluate the design of taxes and transfers and their impact on equity and efficiency. He also studies international taxation and how digital technology is changing public finance and accelerating financial inclusion. He holds a Bachelor and master's in economics from the LSE, and a PhD in Economics from UC Berkeley. He previously was an Assistant Professor of Economics at ESSEC Business School in Paris.

View a full list of research publications on Pierres's researcher website »

Two men looking at a document together in a grain storage area

Informality, Consumption Taxes, and Redistribution

October 2024, Joint with Lucie Gadenne and Anders Jensen

Can taxes on consumption redistribute in developing countries? This paper shows that taxing consumption is progressive once informal consumption is accounted for. Using household expenditure surveys in 32 countries, the researchers proxy for informal consumption using the type of store where purchases occur. The researchers establish that the budget share spent in informal stores steeply declines with income, so that richer households pay a substantially larger share of their income in taxes. The findings imply that the widespread policy of exempting food from taxation is hard to justify on equity grounds in low-income countries.

Postcard for the Policy Research Talk on Taxation for Development

Taxation for Development: Rethinking Fair and Efficient Tax Systems for the Next Decade

May 2024

In the past ten years, tax research has expanded markedly in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). Novel, high-quality, digital-administrative data has combined with governments’ openness to evaluating fiscal policy in a context of rising debt and investment needs to open up new knowledge frontiers. In this Policy Research Talk, Pierre Bachas focuses on the equity of tax systems and shows that the distributional impact of taxes is markedly different in LMICs due to the informal sector and imperfect enforcement.