Our recent report on fiscal policy and income inequality highlighted the importance of considering tax and spending policy together and adopting a ‘whole-of-government’ approach to tackling income inequalities and poverty.

However, it is not clear what a ‘whole-of-government’ approach would look like, or how feasible it would be to implement. Despite the growing interest in tools like microsimulation models and processes like gender budgeting, we know little about the factors that enable or constrain governments to mainstream equity into policy-making.

Can we learn from the practices in higher-income countries and identify concrete lessons and opportunities for lower-income countries? With this aim in mind, ODI is holding a series of events to gather the experience and knowledge of practitioners, researchers and stakeholders at the national and international levels. One of the first events in the series was held in February 2023 and drew on the use of microsimulation models in government and recent trends in adopting ‘wellbeing budgeting’.

This roundtable convened current and former finance ministry officials from different countries to understand how the function of distributional analysis was organised in different countries and how it influenced fiscal policy decisions in finance ministries.