How much redistribution and poverty reduction is being accomplished in Latin America through social spending, subsidies, and taxes? Standard fiscal incidence analyses applied to Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Mexico, Peru, and Uruguay using a comparable methodology yields the following results....

Conventional wisdom states that fiscal policy redistributes little in Latin America. Lower tax revenues and – above all – lower and less progressive transfers have been identified as the main cause. Existing studies show that, while in Europe the distribution of all transfers combined (cash...

This paper introduces a new Lorenz dominance criterion that allows ranking income distributions according to ray-invariant intermediate inequality measures. In doing so, it defines a-Lorenz curves by adapting the generalized Lorenz curves to this case. In addition, it provides an empirical...

Fiscal policy can change poverty and inequality substantially or slightly depending on the government’s redistributive effort. We develop a diagnostic framework to assess how aligned fiscal policies are with supporting a minimum living standard and human capital accumulation, as well as with...

This paper examines how spatial price differentials affect income distribution in Italy. The distribution of household income is “reshuffled” after controlling for the purchasing power of households residents in different regions, but only when housing price variations are included in the...

Inequality measures are often presented in the form of a rank ordering to highlight their relative magnitudes. However, a rank ordering may produce misleading inference, because the inequality measures themselves are statistical estimators with different standard errors, and because a rank...

This paper introduces a class of intermediate inequality indices, I(?, ?), that is at the same time ray-invariant and unit-consistent. These measures permit us to keep some of the good properties of Krtscha’s (1994) index while keeping the same “centrist” attitude whatever the income...

An income inequality measure satisfies the Pigou-Dalton transfer principle if progressive transfers decrease income inequality. When transfers cause transaction costs, one can trace out the maximum leakage such that the transfer pays at the margin. An income inequality measure is leaky-bucket...

We offer a model of equality of opportunity that encompasses different conceptions expressed in the public debate. In addition to circumstances whose effect on outcome should be compensated and eort which represents a legitimate source of inequality, we introduce a third factor, luck, that...

In contrast to the experience in high-income OECD countries, the introduction of democracy in most low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) has been followed, as a rule, by a concentration of income. Using the median voter hypothesis as analytical tool, this paper explores the conditions under...