The paper proposes and applies statistical tests for poverty dominance that check for whether poverty comparisons can be made robustly over ranges of poverty lines and classes of poverty indices. This helps provide both normative and statistical confidence in establishing poverty rankings across...

This paper tackles the issues of social polarization and income polarization in several North American, European and Australian countries in the perspective of redistribution patterns. Presenting a simple theoretical framework, we argue that comparing both types of polarization can help predict...

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...

We propose a general class of indices of horizontal inequity that complements existing classes of progressivity and vertical equity indices. The class of horizontal inequity indices can also correct for biases in measuring a general class of inequality measures. We illustrate our results using...

Income inequality measures involve two sub-classes of decomposable measures: those decomposed by sub-groups and those decomposed by income source. The former enables one to compute between- and within-group indices. The latter allows for gauging the inequality related to each factor of income...

The purpose of this paper is to show that the Gini index of equality is: (i) subgroup decomposable throughout interpersonal comparisons; (ii) decomposable by income source; (iii) decomposable both by subgroup and income source; (iv) and decomposable in a multidimensional context permitting...

The federal government announced in its 2012 budget its intention to delay the age of eligibility for Old Age Security and the Guaranteed Income Supplement from 65 to 67 years. By the time the policy is fully implemented (i.e., in 2030), this delay will have increased net revenues of the fedral...

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...

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...

Four axioms are introduced in order to characterize the family of pair-based decomposable inequality measures, which is embraced in the class of weakly decomposable inequality measures. Three axioms, namely, normalization by pairs, aggregation by pairs, and decomposition by pairs enable the...