There is no consensus about which variables, apart from income per capita, serve to characterize or define economic development, or guide its teaching. This paper proposes a simple and operational definition that combines the level of income per capita and the distribution of income. An economic...

It has been noted that failure to meet the target set by government for reducing the head count ratio of child poverty in Britain is partly due to the success of government policy in generating economic growth. Apart from missing the argument that absolute poverty is not a meaningful idea, this...

The paper starts with a brief review of present understanding of income distributions; especially with regard to recent work in the field of econophysics that draws parallels between income, wealth and energy distributions. Examples of alternative energy distributions found in physical systems...

Two sets of high quality income data are analysed in detail, one set from the UK, one from the USA. It is firstly demonstrated that both a log-normal distribution and a Boltzmann distribution can give very accurate fits to both these data sets. The absence of a power tail in the US data set is...

Empirical study, using regression analysis of the combined cross-section and time series data for 83 countries. The following hypotheses are tested: (1) The Kuznets Curve does not exist. That is, the level of per capita income has no effect on income distribution, once other relevant factors are...

This paper estimates the potential effects of a free trade agreement (FTA) between China and Mercosur on poverty, income distribution, welfare and employment. The case of Argentina, in particular, is investigated. To this end, partial equilibrium techniques are combined with micro econometric...

This chapter examines the process of development from an epoch of Malthusian stagnation to a state of sustained economic growth. The analysis focuses on recently advanced unified growth theories that capture the intricate evolution of income per capita, technology, and population over the course...

We develop a demo-economic micro-simulation model able to simulate over a fifteen years period the impact of AIDS on household and individual incomes. When focusing on the labor supply effects of over- mortality, the main effect of AIDS in Cˆote d’Ivoire is a shrinking of the size of the...

The objective of this work is to analyse the income inequality in the 15 EU countries during the convergence process to the Monetary Union. Using the information contained in the European Community Household Panel, corresponding to the four first waves. Using the inverse second order stochastic...

The median voter hypothesis has been central to an extensive literature on consequences of income distribution. For example, it has been proposed that greater inequality is associated with lower growth, because of the greater redistribution that is sought by the median voter when income...