Many countries spend significant resources on investment promotion agencies (IPAs) in the hope of attracting inflows of foreign direct investment (FDI). Despite the importance of this question for public policy choices, little is known about the effectiveness of investment promotion efforts....

Standard theory of intertemporal choice predicts that people smooth out life-cycle changes in income by borrowing and saving, such that their standard of living in any given year depends more on lifetime income than on that year’s income. Yet, contemporary empirical studies of income...

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...

Amartya Sen has developed the so-called capability approach to meet the criticism that income alone may be insufficient as a measure of economic inequality. This is because knowledge about people’s income does not tell us what they are able to acquire with that income. For example, people with...

The overall inequality effects of a dual income tax (DIT) system, combining progressive taxation of labor income with proportional taxation of income from capital, are investigated. Simple examples show that correlations between distributions of wage and capital income, the degree of tax rate...

Do market-orientated economies with relatively large cross-sectional levels of inequality have higher income mobility and therefore less permanent inequality? To answer this question, we introduce a formal representation of income mobility as an equalizer of permanent income. The proposed...

This paper presents a new method for calculating Gini coefficients from tabulations of the mean income of social classes. Income distribution data from before the Industrial Revolution usually come in the form of such tabulations, called social tables. Inequality indices generated from social...

The purpose of this paper is to study the impact of including the value of public health care, longterm care, education and childcare on estimates of income inequality and financial poverty in 23 European countries. The valuation of public services and the identification of target groups rely on...

This paper is concerned with concepts – poverty, inequality, affluence, and polarization – that are typically treated in different literatures. Our aim here is to place them within a common framework and to identify the way in which different classes of income transfers contribute to...

An evaluation strategy is presented for answering the question is the tax schedule more redistributive after a reform than prior to a reform? The proposed procedure builds upon addressing measures of tax redistribution, utilizing micro data from periods before and after the reform. Tax...