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.

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 paper provides a normative appraisal of the Canadian equalization transfers system. For that sake, the two-dimensional dominance criteria introduced by Atkinson and Bourguignon(RES, 1982) are used to compare the distributions of private and public good before and after equalization...

Considering an economy with two goods {a private good and a household good with a variable degree of publicness {and identical individuals, the paper investigates the implications for economies of size of two extreme households' decision rules: (i) the cooperative model, where households...

This paper provides a robust normative evaluation of the spectacular growth episode that India has experienced in the last 15 years. Specifically, the paper compares the evolution, between 1998, 1996 and 2001 of the distribution of several important individual attributes on the basis of...

This paper provides a survey of normative approaches to inequality measurement, to be published as a chapter in a volume of income inequality. We present general methods for deriving ethical inequality indexes from social-evaluation orderings such as the Atkinson-Kolm-Sen and Kolm procedures.

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...