The impact of increased affluence on life satisfaction is a matter of some controversy. This paper examines the impact of the recent economic boom in Ireland upon the level and distribution of various domains of well-being. There is evidence of a substantial increase in life satisfaction in the...

This paper examines the change in welfare in IReland over the 1987-1994 period by investigating whether Lorenz and Generalised Lorenz dominance can be observed for household expenditure data. It also calculated bootstrapped standard error measures for Lorenz and Generalised Lorenz curves and...

Why did the West grow so rapidly over the last 500 years, while much of therest of the world stagnated? And why several countries, especially in East Asia, grown so fast over the last half-century? If we can understand these growth experiences, and identify the forces which made them possible,...

This paper examines the change in welfare in Ireland over the 1987- 1994 period by investigating whether Lorenz and Generalised Lorenz dominance can be observed for household expenditure data. It also calculates bootstrapped standard error measures for Lorenz and Generalised Lorenz curves and...

There is a large empirical literature on policy measures targeted at children but surprisingly very little theoretical foundation to ground the debate on the optimality of the different instruments. In the present paper, we examine the merit of targeting children through two general policies,...

It is commonplace to observe that one of the great changes of the modern age is not only that life expectancy is much longer than a century or two ago, but that there has been a radical change in the causes of death. Even in the nineteenth century, infectious disease was by far the biggest cause...

When measuring poverty over time analysts must choose the value of the income elacticity of the poverty line. The choice of this paremeter is ultimately a value judgement but this paper suggests an approach which has some empirical basis. Borrowing from the life-style and deprivation approach to...

Results from poverty studies are sensitive to the choice f the poverty line. Poverty dominance analysis uses stochastic dominance to provide rankings of distributions in terms of poverty which are not sensitive to the choice of poverty lines or which at least give an unambiguous results over a...