When incomes are exogenously given, a progressive tax structure reduces inequality in the sense that the Lorenz curve of after tax incomes is nowhere below that of before tax incomes whatever the circumstances as it was shown by U. Jakobsson (Journal of Public Economics 5 (1976), 161-168) The...

This article discusses the properties of Kolm’s ELIE proposal in the Context of optimal income taxation “à la Mirrlees”. It first shows that ELIE gives rise to non-standard type-dependent budget sets, which has important implications in terms of a minimum labour requirement. Second, it...

Simula and Trannoy (2007) have shown that ELIE is confronted with implementation issues when the policymaker cannot observe the time worked by every individual. This paper tries to fix this problem. To this aim, it characterizes the second-best allocations which are the closest to ELIE (i) in...

Restricting attention to quasi-linear utility functions, we examine in the paper the distributive incidence of income taxes used to finance the production of a single public good.

inequality decreases and welfare increases as a result of a progressive transfer. We explore the implications for welfare and inequality measurement of substituting the weaker absolute differentials and deprivation quasi-orderings for the Lorenz quasi-ordering. Restricting attention to...

Xu’s theorem comforts ranking the freedom of choice provided by budget sets as their volume in deriving it from three axioms. Yet, one and a half of these axioms can be discussed. In contrast, simple logic – it seems – leads one to order the freedom provided by budgets sets as the distance...

Consider an income distribution among households of the same size in which individuals, equally needy from the point of view of an ethical observer, are treated unfairly. Individuals are split into two types, the dominant and the dominated. We look for conditions under which welfare and...

This paper provides a comparison of 12 OECD countries on the basis of the (multidimensional) inequality in both disposable income and access to public goods. The public goods considered, measured at the regional level, are infant mortality and pupils/teacher ratios at public schools. The...

We investigate the problem of how to make welfare comparisons of income distributions hen a population allocation problem (how a population should be optimally divided over families for given resources) adds to the usual income allocation problem. Pro-family and anti-family stances are...

We derive the asymptotic sampling distribution of various estimators frequently used to order distributions in terms of poverty, welfare and inequality. This includes estimators of most of the poverty indices currently in use, as well as estimators of the curves used to infer stochastic...