Based on empirical facts, we build a model of informal insurance institutions and study their stability. In our setting, risk sharing groups are overlapping homogenous coalitions, originating from networks of historical trust relationships. We derive a general folk theorem that works in an...

Growth of the informal sector of the Senegalese economy may result in a productivity slowdown and could induce a surge in inequality and poverty. The production process is similar for some subsectors of the informal sector and those of the formal one. But there is evidence that the economy is...

Labour market analysis is an important element to understand the inequality and poverty within a given population. The literature reveals that the informal sector is characterised by a great deal of flexibility and exempt from formal market rigidities but on the other hand, this sector can...

This note applies tools from the stochastic dominance literature on poverty to environmental data in order to test in a robust way whether over-consumption and thereby depletion of natural resources is increasing over time. \ The method is illustrated with country data on per capita CO_{2}...

Income inequality measures involve two sub-classes of decomposable measures: those decomposed by sub-groups and those decomposed by income source. The former enables one to compute between- and within-group indices. The latter allows for gauging the inequality related to each factor of income...

The purpose of this paper is to show that the Gini index of equality is: (i) subgroup decomposable throughout interpersonal comparisons; (ii) decomposable by income source; (iii) decomposable both by subgroup and income source; (iv) and decomposable in a multidimensional context permitting...

This paper proposes techniques to test for whether growth has been pro-poor. We first review different definitions of pro-poorness and argue for the use of methods that can generate results that are robust over classes of pro-poor measures and ranges of poverty lines. We then provide statistical...

Four axioms are introduced in order to characterize the family of pair-based decomposable inequality measures, which is embraced in the class of weakly decomposable inequality measures. Three axioms, namely, normalization by pairs, aggregation by pairs, and decomposition by pairs enable the...

This paper analyzes the definition of economic efficiency. The standard definition used in economic literature is the Pareto Optimum which is based in the space of individual utilities. This paper proposes new definitions based on alternative spaces. The paper also introduces a dominance...

La littérature montre que la mesure des inégalités de revenu n’est pas suffisante pour appréhender les déterminants des inégalités. Les sources de rémunération, leurs corrélations au revenu global, leurs parts dans le revenu global, rentrent en compte dans la décomposition de la...