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 consider an n-person economy in which efficiency is independent of distribution but the cardinal properties of the agents’ utility functions preclude transferable utility (a property we call "Almost TU"). We show that Almost TU is a necessary and sufficient condition for all agents to...

Consider an n-person economy in which efficiency is independent of distribution but the cardinal properties of the agents’ utility functions precludes transferable utility (a property we call “Almost TU”). We show that Almost TU is a necessary and sufficient condition for all agents to...

This study assesses the incidence of pollution control policies on households. In contrast to previous studies, we employ an integrated framework combining a multisector general equilibrium model with a stochastic dominance analysis using household-leved data. We consider three policy...

This article draws up a portrait of effective marginal tax rates (EMTRs) 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...

Le financement public des services de garde (SDG) est au cœur d’objectifs multiples au Québec et ailleurs au Canada. Cet article rapporte l’impact des trois mesures principales de financement public (le crédit d’impôt provincial, la déduction d’impôt fédérale, et les subventions...

Income mobility is often thought to equalize permanent incomes and thereby to improve social welfare. The welfare analysis of mobility often fails, however, to account for the cost of the variability of periodic incomes around permanent incomes. This paper assesses the net welfare benefit 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...

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...