Annual network meeting of the Politicians, Policies, and the Reproduction of Wealth (PoWER) project

The PoWER project workshop brought together researchers from partnering institutes in Germany, the United Kingdom, and Brazil to share project updates, discuss constraints, review ongoing analyses, and plan for the upcoming year. The three-day gathering took place at the ACEIR South Africa node at the Southern Africa Labour and Development Research Unit, University of Cape Town.

The project, which is funded by the Volkswagen Foundation, examines how politician characteristics influence wealth reproduction through policy making. The principal investigators for the project are Prof. Eva Wegner and Prof. Miquel Pellicer, University of Marburg, Germany; Prof. Despina Alexiadou, University of Strathclyde, United Kingdom; Prof. Raquel Pimenta, FGV São Paulo, Brazil; and, representing ACEIR, Prof. Vimal Ranchhod from the University of Cape Town.
 

While the research and analyses are still in nascent stages, some interesting emergent results were presented at the workshop.

For example, preliminary results from the UK and German teams suggest that finance ministers with finance or corporate backgrounds are associated with relaxing certain types of tax regimes, which are most likely pro-wealthy. 

The Brazilian team found evidence that parliamentarians submitting amendments to increase tax exemptions for the wealthy were more likely to use technical strategies and succeed compared to those proposing pro-redistribution amendments. 

The South Africa team, tasked with developing analytical frameworks to estimate the distributive impact of various policy regimes, exhibited through the various microsimulation models they are developing that top wealth shares are highly resilient to changes in income-affecting taxes.

The workshop concluded with a town hall session where principal investigators presented their ongoing research and answered questions on its relevance to contemporary academic and policy research, particularly in the South African context.

The PoWER project is one of several multidisciplinary collaborative studies on wealth and inequalities involving teams of ACEIR researchers.