This paper attempts to provide a synthetic view of varied techniques available for performing inference on income distributions. Two main approaches can be distinguished: one in which the object of interest is some index of income inequality or poverty, the other based on notions of stochastic...

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...

A local measure of classical horizontal inequity (HI) in an income tax or tax-benefit system is proposed and aggregated into a global index. This index expresses the revenue gain per capita that would come from eliminating HI welfare-neutrally, and also reveals the loss of vertical performance,...

Is horizontal equity (HE) the `most widely accepted principle of equity'? Or does it stand in `opposition to the advancement of human welfare'? This paper argues that the case for the HE principle is not as straightforward as is usually thought and that it requires advanced notions of justice...