H. Xavier Jara is an applied economist working in the fields of public and development economics and specialized in the study of poverty and inequality, the redistributive effect of tax-benefit policies, labour supply and well-being measurement. He is also co-founder of the network on Welfare and Policy in Latin America and the Caribbean (WAPLAC). He holds a PhD in Economics and a Master of Advanced Studies in Economics from the University of Leuven. Prior to joining the III, he worked as a Research Fellow at the Institute for Social and Economic Research (ISER) at the University of Essex.

Xavier has extensive experience in the use of quantitative methods and microsimulation techniques for distributional analysis in high, low, and middle-income countries. He contributed to the development of EUROMOD, the tax-benefit model for the European Union, as well as microsimulation models for Latin American countries as part of the SOUTHMOD project and other initiatives. His recent work concentrates on the link between informality and inequality in Latin America with a focus on the role of public policies.

Xavier’s research has been published in international journals such as World Development, Scandinavian Journal of Economics, International Tax and Public Finance, Journal of Economic Inequality, Journal of Common Market Studies, Social Choice and Welfare, Journal of African Economies, and the European Journal of Development Research.