Personal profile
Research areas
Hitomi Komatsu is a Guest Researcher in the Sustainable Development and Governance Unit at the Danish Institute for International Studies. She received her Ph.D. in Economics from American University and B.Sc. in Economics from University College London.
Her research focuses on the intersection of fiscal and tax policy, women’s labor force participation, informality, and economic empowerment in low- and middle-income countries. She has contributed to advancing analytical frameworks for integrating gender considerations into fiscal policy analysis, including leading the development of World Bank guidance on applying a gender lens to fiscal diagnostics. Her research also explores taxpayer behavior, small business tax regimes, and the use of survey and administrative tax data to inform tax policy and institutional reforms. In addition, she has published research on gender and labor, including on women’s time use, agricultural work, and nutrition and food security.
She previously worked as an Economist in the Fiscal Policy Unit at the World Bank. Earlier in her career, she served as Programme Manager at the United Nations Capital Development Fund and Programme Officer at the United Nations Development Programme in Malawi. She has also consulted for the United Nations Statistics Division and the International Food Policy Research Institute.
Current research
She is currently undertaking a landscape mapping of public finance approaches for gender equality in the context of declining aid flows to low- and middle-income countries. These approaches cover government spending, subsidy reforms, public-private partnerships, tax policy, and aid flows from multilateral and bilateral organizations.