Maria Jouste is a research associate at UNU-WIDER. She holds a PhD in economics from the University of Turku. Her research interest is in development and public economics, focusing on taxation and social protection in developing countries. She uses both empirical and microsimulation methods for the evaluation of policy-relevant research questions, and has experience in curating and employing large administrative tax data in collaboration with African revenue authorities.
Ravi Kanbur is T. H. Lee Professor of World Affairs and Economics at Cornell University and Co-Chair of the Food Systems Economics Commission. He has served on the senior staff of the World Bank including as Chief Economist for Africa and has published work in leading economics journals. He has previously held positions as Chair of the Board of United Nations University-World Institute for Development Economics Research, member of the OECD High-Level Expert Group on the Measurement of Economic Performance, President of the Human Development and Capability Association, President of the Society for the Study of Economic Inequality.
Jukka Pirttilä is Professor of Public Economics at the University of Helsinki and VATT Institute for Economic Research. He also serves as the deputy director of Helsinki Graduate School of Economics and as a Non-Resident Senior Research Fellow at UNU-WIDER. He conducts research on topics in public economics, especially tax policies, with a special reference to taxation in developing countries.
Pia Rattenhuber is a research fellow at UNU-WIDER. She works in the fields of public, development, and labour economics, specializing in redistribution policies. She leads UNU-WIDER's work on tax-benefit microsimulation in the SOUTHMOD project. She holds a PhD from Free University Berlin and previously worked for the OECD (in the Department of Labour and Social Affairs), the German Ministry of Economics, and the German Institute of Economic Research (DIW Berlin).