Imputed rental income of homeowners is tax exempt in most countries, despite the long-standing arguments recommending its inclusion in the tax base, on both equity and efficiency grounds. The current fiscal crisis revived interest towards this form of taxation. The paper investigates the fiscal...

This paper shows how distance functions, a tool typically employed in production economics to measure the distance between a set of inputs and a set of outputs, can be employed to approximate a composite measure encompassing the many dimensions of well-being. It also illustrates how to implement...

Non-cash benefits can have substantial effects on the distribution of economic welfare. Standard approaches to the inclusion of non-cash benefits in broader measures of resources have failed to take adequate account of the pattern of needs associated with the greater use of health and education...

We studied whether relative income has an impact on subjective well-being among extremely poor people. Contrary to the findings in developed countries, where relative income has shown a significant and negative impact on subjective well-being, we cannot reject the hypothesis that relative income...

We explore the relationships between subjective well-being and income, as seen across individuals within a given country, between countries in a given year, and as a country grows through time. We show that richer individuals in a given country are more satisfied with their lives than are poorer...

The paper analyzes the link between old-age income programs and economic outcomes in Belgium. We use a simulation methodology to construct an average pension generosity variable. Our regression analysis explores the link with distributional outcomes in income, consumption and more subjective...

This paper discusses data used in publishing statistics on earnings, the distribution of household income and poverty in China by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) which is widely used by policy makers, international agencies and researchers. Unlike many other countries, China until...

The current poverty rate and the persistent poverty rate are both included in the EU's portfolio of primary indicators of social inclusion. We show that there is a near-linear relationship between these two indicators across EU countries drawing on empirical analysis of EU-SILC and ECHP data....

Extending the traditional income poverty concept by multidimensional poverty has been of growing interest within the last years. This paper contributes with an analysis of interdependent multidimensional (IMD) poverty intensity of time and income, which in particular restricts social...

This paper is concerned with the problem of ranking and quantifying the extent of deprivation exhibited by multidimensional distributions, where the multiple attributes in which an individual can be deprived are represented by dichotomized variables. To this end we first aggregate deprivation...