A methodology to describe the distributional and behavioural effects of child care subsidies is presented within a micro simulation framework. We discuss the effects of changing the governmental policy to support families with preschool children, from today's subsidisation of spaces at child...

In many developing countries, there does not exist a time series of nationally repre- sentative household budget or income surveys, while there often are urban household surveys as well as nationally representative Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) which lack information on incomes. This...

The primus inter pares of the UN Millennium Development Goals is to reduce poverty. The only internationally accepted method of estimating poverty requires a measurement of total consumption based on a time and resource demanding household budget or integrated survey over 12 months. Rather than...

This paper examines the performance of a particular method for predicting poverty. The method is a supplement to the approach of measuring poverty through a fully-fledged household expenditure survey. As most developing countries cannot justify the expenses of frequent household expenditure...

A major difficulty faced by researchers who want to study the consumption and savings behavior of households is the lack of reliable panel data on household expenditures. One possibility is to use surveys that follow the same households over time, but such data are rare and they typically have...

Using newly comprehensive data and tools from the Global Consumption and Income Project or CGIP, covering most of the world and five decades, we present a portrait of the changing global distribution of consumption and income and discuss its implications for our understanding of inequality,...

Interest in the emergence of a global middle class has resulted in a number of attempts to identify and enumerate who belongs to it . Current research provides wildly different estimates about the size and evolution of the global middle class because of a lack of consensus on appropriate...

It is shown that if social welfare is the sum of logaritmic utility function, the optimal income distribution and the welfare effect of any income redistribution is independet of the equivalence scales. In optimum all households have the same per capita income. Based on this observation it is...

This paper focuses on the measurement of progressivity and the distributional effect of the Norwegian tax reform of 1992. Progressivity is measured by the degree of disproportionality, which implies that the burden of taxes is estimated when income units are ranked according to pre-tax incomes....

Are we better or worse off after the Norwegian tax reform of 1992 and how has the reform influenced the income sizes and the distribution of total income? This question denotes our twofold analysis in this paper. We first examine the trends in average income and income distribution in the period...