Georgia State University has created a free online data source that will help researchers analyze tax policies around the world.

The World Tax Indicators data portal helps researchers and policy makers define benchmarks for the performance of tax systems globally, said Jorge Martinez-Vazquez, regent professor of economics at Georgia State.

Dr. Martinez-Vazquez, who is also the director of the international studies program at Georgia State’s Andrew Young School of Policy Studies, told GlobalAtlanta in an email that the data portal allows its users to analyze income inequalities and the impact of tax policies on income redistribution and economic growth.

The portal, he said,  provides researchers with extensive data by country, by year or by a number of different variables such as tax complexity.

“It is the first time all of this data has been collected in one place,” said Denvil Duncan, an assistant professor at Indiana University and a graduate from the Andrew Young school, in a news release.

Dr. Duncan, Dr. Martinez-Vazquez, Jenny Ligthart, a professor at Tilburg University in the Netherlands and Klara Sabirianova Peter, an associate professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, assembled the data.

“This is a public service of a big proportion at a world scale that would help increase the recognition and visibility of the Andrew Young School nationally and internationally,” Dr. Martinez-Vazquez said.

The team of experts is to continue to develop the portal, adding data on corporate income, value-added and retail sales taxes.

Dr. Martinez-Vazquez is an expert on international tax policies and won Russia‘s first National Prize in Applied Economics for a study on the country’s flat tax along with Dr. Peter and Yuriy Gorodnichenko of the University of California at Berkeley.

Published in the Journal of Political Economy, the study concluded that the flat tax enacted in 2001 did little to spur economic activity.

Dr. Martinez-Vazquez also won an award last year for his research in reforming public institutions and policies in developing countries by Deutsche Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit, an agency that supports the German government in furthering sustainable development internationally.

To see the data portal, visit http://aysps.gsu.edu/isp/wti.htm