The paper examines the development of incomes in Germany at different welfare levels, together with current trends in poverty. The analyses are based on data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) study, which provides detailed annual information on incomes starting in the mid-1980s....

Considering the contribution of the distribution of individual wages and earnings to that of household incomes we find two separate literatures that should be brought together, and bring “new institutions” into play. Growing female employment, rising dual-earnership and part-time employment...

Studies of inequality often ignore resource allocation within the household. In doing so they miss an important element of the distribution of welfare that can vary dramatically depending on overall environmental and economic factors. Thus, measures of inequality that ignore intrahousehold...

The chapter examines how the various dimensions of economic inequality between men and women are analyzed today. Beyond the gender wage gap—a central issue—and of course the still far from equal sharing of housework, the chapter also reviews research on gender inequality in access to...

This paper proposes a methodological framework for examining the distributional effects of alternative agricultural policies in less developed economies. The framework combines disaggregated household models with an explicit modelling of the linkages between product and factor markets.

This paper is a review of the post-war literature on income distribution and development. It argues that the literature has cycled from one consensus to another, responding to emerging policy issues and new analysis. On the basis of the review, the paper identifies five areas that will command...

Income and wealth inequality rose over the first 150 years of US history. They rose in Britain before 1875, especially 1740–1810. The first half of the 20th century equalized pre-fisc incomes both in Britain and in America. From the 1970s to the 1990s inequality rose in both countries,...

In this paper, the amount of income redistribution in the United States, the European Union, and Switzerland is compared and empirically related to economic, political, and behavioral determinants elaborated in the literature. Lying in between the two poles, Switzerland provides unique evidence...

Subgroup Decomposability is a very useful property in an inequality measure, and level-sensitivity, which requires a given level of inequality to acquire a greater significance the poorer a population is, is a distributionally appealing axiom for an inequality index to satisfy. In this paper,...

This paper analyses income inequality in Ireland using a new panel dataset based on the administrative tax records of the Revenue Commissioners for Ireland. High inequality at market incomes in Ireland by international standards appears to be driven by both ends of the income distribution. An...