Since the 1970s, Chile has exhibited a highly skewed income distribution accompanied with strong fluctuations over time. Although income distribution worsened notably in the 1970s-80s, a significant improvement was recorded in the first half of the 1990s, resulting from better economic and...

The United Nations Millennium Declaration commits to halving extreme poverty between 2000 and 2015. The South African government has set a goal of halving poverty by 2014, although the meaning of this goal has not yet been defined. This article specifies government.s stated target of halving...

Based on the standard axiom of individual utility maximization, rational choice has postulated that higher income inequality translates into greater redistribution by shaping the median voter?s preferences. While numerous papers have tested this propositi

This paper challenges this view. It argues that while income inequality declined in several nations between the 1950s and 1970s, this trend has been reversed during the last twenty years in two-thirds of the countries with adequate data. This conclusion is based on an econometric analysis of...

In the current debate on the relationship between inequality in income distribution and growth one of the possible link works through the access to education. After reviewing this debate, a formal model shows how the imperfection of financial markets makes educational choices dependent on the...

This paper reviews Finland.s growth strategy in the postwar decades. Finland was able to initiate an impressive mobilization of resources during this period, reflected mostly in a high rate of capital accumulation for manufacturing industries. This was achieved by an unorthodox combination of...

This paper establishes the principles which should govern the welfare and inequality analysis of heterogeneous income distributions. Two basic criteria?the ?equity preference? condition and the ?compensation principle??are shown to be fundamentally incompatible. The paper favours the latter,...

We describe a new method of facilitating inequality and poverty analysis of grouped distributional data by allowing individual income observations to be reconstructed from any feasible grouping pattern. In contrast to earlier methods, our procedure ensures that the characteristics of the...