Following Milanovic's (1997) paper [Economics Letters, vol. 56, p. 45-49], we propose a simple way to compute the Gini index when income y is a quadratic function of its rank among n individuals.

We assess whether global social welfare has improved in the last decades despite (or because of) the substantial increase in global population. We use for this purpose a relatively unknown but simple and attractive social evaluation approach called critical-level generalized utilitarianism...

In this paper, we propose a new multidimensional inequality index that satisfies a fundamental set of desired properties. We discuss the case where the social evaluation function of welfare depends simultaneously on unidimensional and multidimensional forms of inequality. We show how this mixed...

The evaluation of development processes and of public policies often involves comparisons of social states that differ in income distributions, population sizes and life longevity. This may require social evaluation principles to be sensitive to the quality, the quantity and the duration of...

Using a large sample of US urban areas, we provide systematic evidence that mean household income rises with city ('agglomeration'), that this effect is stronger for the top of the income distribution ('polarization'), and that household income inequality increases at a decreasing rate in city...

La littérature montre que la mesure des inégalités de revenu n’est pas suffisante pour appréhender les déterminants des inégalités. Les sources de rémunération, leurs corrélations au revenu global, leurs parts dans le revenu global, rentrent en compte dans la décomposition de la...

We propose simple graphical methods to identify poverty-reducing marginal reforms of transfer programs. The methods are based on Program Dominance curves that display cumulative program benefits weighted by powers of poverty gaps. These curves can be decomposed simply as sums of targeting...

This paper introduces the concept of Pigou-Dalton transfers between populations of income receivers. Gini's mean difference and Dagum's Gini index between populations are axiomatically derived in order to gauge the impact of within- and between-group Pigou-Dalton transfers on Dagum's measure. We...

Nous proposons une nouvelle méthode de décomposition. La multidécomposition de l’indicateur de Gini combine deux méthodes de décomposition : la décomposition en sous-groupes et la décomposition en sources de revenu. La technique retenue est mise en oeuvre dans le cadre d’une étude...

We investigate how to make poverty comparisons using multidimensional indicators of well-being, showing in particular how to check whether the comparisons are robust to aggregation procedures and to the choice of multidimensional poverty lines. In contrast to earlier work, our methodology...