Acemoglu, Johnson, & Robinson (2002) have claimed that the world incomedistribution underwent a "Reversal of Fortune" from 1500 to the present, wherebyformerly rich countries in what is now the developing world became poor whilepoor ones grew rich. We question their analysis with regard to both...

Specific functional forms are often used in economic models of distributions;goodness-of-fit measures are used to assess whether a functional form is appropriatein the light of real-world data. Standard approaches use a distance criterion based onthe EDF, an aggregation of differences in...

This article is a comparative analysis of the sources of income inequalityin four countries, namely Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and the UnitedKingdom. It relies upon decompositions of inequality measures bypopulation groups and income sources (except for Japan because of datalimitations)....

We examine the performance of measures of mobility when allowance ismade for the possibility of data contamination. We find that “singlestage”indices – those that are applied directly to a sample from amultivariate income distribution – usually prove to be non-robust in theface of...

It is worth distinguishing social exclusion from social isolation, definingsocial isolation as the phenomenon of non-participation (of anindividual or group) in a society’s mainstream institutions, whilereserving ‘social exclusion’ for the subset of cases in which socialisolation occurs...

This paper is an overview of the social welfare systems of five EastAsian countries, namely Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong andSingapore. It analyses the overall costs of welfare as well as incomedistribution aspects, based on both aggregate data and a programme-byprogrammereview of their...

The rise in inequality and poverty is one of the most important economicand social issues in recent times. But in contrast to the literature onindividual earnings inequality, there has been little work modelling (asopposed to documenting) household income dynamics. This is largelybecause of the...

We address a puzzle in welfare economics - the possibility that rational people maybe simultaneously against two apparently conflicting forms of “tyranny”. In fact thetwo types of tyranny can be reconciled but at the possible cost of conflict with otherstandard welfare principles. We examine...

Regular annual studies made by the Office of National Statistics in the UK areintended to show how far taxing household incomes and giving benefits in cash andkind to households redistributes income from rich to poor. The first attempt to do thisin the UK was made by Tibor Barna for the year...

The increases in human longevity in recent decades and the trends for early retirement have posed new challenges for policy makers, and require a holistic understanding of the processes that influence the economic resources of older people. This paper contributes to this knowledge by examining...