What is freedom? What is equality? In which way can greater equality increase freedom? Such are the main questions which this paper tries to answer. The problem of the choice between freedom and equality indeed raises the problem of the definition of these two objects. Once this definition is...

The evaluation of development processes and of public policies often involves comparisons of social states in which populations differ in size and longevity. This requires social evaluation principles to be sensitive to both the number and the length of lives. This paper explores the use of...

This paper provides a method to make robust multidimensional poverty comparisons when one or more of the dimensions of well-being or deprivation is discrete. Sampling distributions for the statistics used in these poverty comparisons are provided. Several examples show that the methods are both...

This paper studies the microeconomics of child vulnerability to kidnapping in an environment where child protection is produced through a private effort, a public investment and a foreign aid. We first show that in absence of public investment and foreign aid, private investment in child...

Housing deprivation orderings raise challenges as far as measurement is concerned. The first challenge resides in the identification of an adequate variable that characterizes housing services consumed by households. Another challenge may arise in the comparisons of housing services consumption...

This paper explores the link between polarization and inequality and proposes some analytical methods to decompose the Duclos, Esteban, and Ray (2004) polarization index by population groups or income sources. In some cases, the decomposition methods were extended to the Esteban and Ray (1994)...

Decomposing inequality indices across household groups or income source is useful in estimating the contribution of each component to total inequality. This can help policy makers draw efficient policies to reduce disparities in the distribution of incomes using targeting tools. Decomposing...

This paper studies the pro-poor growth in the Latino American Andean countries. We first present different definitions of pro-poorness and the related methods in order to generate the statistically robust results for classes of pro-poor measures. Also, we present the non anonymous pro-poor...

This article draws up a portrait of effective marginal tax rates (EMTR) on labour income in Quebec. It aims at allowing a better understanding of the impact of tax policy on the behavior of economic agents. Using an accounting microsimulation model that reproduces the system of taxes and...

This paper suggests a methodology to identify socially-desirable directions for poverty-alleviating tax reforms. The cost-benefit ratio of increasing any commodity-tax rate is derived from the minimization of a poverty measure subject to a revenue requirement for the government. Further, to...