This paper tests, using data from South Africa and Pakistan, two major implications of the unitary household model, namely, that (a) each individual pools the various components of her/his non labour earnings, and (b) men and women pool their non labour earnings between themselves. The study...

This study provides evidence on optimal commodity tax rates in Australia, and on their sensitivity to demand function and demographic specification. The optimal tax algorithm, proposed and used here, allows the social welfare weights to depend on prices, household composition and aggregate...

This paper reviews the analytical and empirical evidence on certain issues in commodity tax design that have not received much attention. These include the impact on optimal commodity taxes of allowing the following: (i)non linear Engel curves, (ii)Household composition and child subsidy,...

This paper provides evidence showing that the insensivity of marginal commodity tax reforms to demand specification, observed in recent studies, does not extend to the non marginal case. The size of the tax change has a sharp impact on commodity tax reforms. In constrast to priceeffects, neither...

This paper examines inequality in Australia using four Household Expenditure Surveys (HES) between 1975/76 and 1993/94, from the Australian Burau of Statistics (ABS). The effects on inequality of the choice of welfare variable, equivalence scale and price index are examined.

This paper proposes and applies an alternative demographic procedure for extending a demand system to allow for the effect of household size and composition changes, along with price changes, on expenditure allocation. The demographic procedure is applied to two recent demand functional forms to...

The unitary household model implies pooling of all individual incomes. This study distinguishes between various types of income pooling and tests them on Australian household income/expenditure data. The tests recognise the endogeneity of both earned and unearned income and are performed using a...