Food price increases and the introduction of radical social welfare and enterprise reforms during the 1990s generated significant changes in the lives of urban households in China. During this period urban poverty increased considerably. This paper uses household level data from 1986 to 2000 to...

This paper evaluates income distributions in four European countries (Austria, Italy, Spain and Hungary) using two complementary approaches: a standard approach based on reported incomes in survey data, and a microsimulation approach, where taxes and benefits are simulated. Given that benefit...

This paper assesses the impact on household incomes of the COVID-19 pandemic and governments’ policy responses in April 2020 in four large and severely hit European countries: Belgium, Italy, Spain and the UK. We provide comparative evidence on the level of relative and absolute welfare...

We assess how tax-benefit policy developments in 2001-2011 affected the household income distribution in seven EU countries. We use the standard microsimulation-based decomposition method, separating further the effect of structural policy changes and the uprating of monetary parameters, which...

China's global expansion has led to concerns amongst other developing country exporters that they will be displaced by Chinese competition in their export markets. The paper develops a new index to measure the extent of the competitive threat which countries face from China, which is then...

This paper measures the vulnerability of households in rural India, based upon the ICRISAT panel survey. We employ both ex ante and ex post measures of vulnerability. The latter are decomposed into aggregate and idiosyncratic risks and poverty components. Our decomposition shows that...

This paper describes changes over the past 15-20 years in non-income measures of wellbeing—education and health—in Africa. We expected to find, as we did in Latin America, that progress in the provision of public services and the focus of public spending in the social sector would contribute...

The literature on the economics of happiness in the developed economies finds discrepancies between reported measures of wellbeing and income measures. The ‘Easterlin paradox’, for example, shows that average happiness levels do not increase as countries grow wealthier. This article explores...

In a heterogeneous population which can be partitioned into well-defined subgroups, it is plausible that the extent of measured aggregate poverty should depend upon the distribution of poverty across the subgroups. A judgment in favour of an equal inter-group distribution of poverty could arise...

This paper proposes a decomposition framework for quantifying contributions of the determinants of poverty to spatial differences or temporal changes in poverty. This framework is then applied to address the issue why poverty incidence is higher in inland than in coastal China. The empirical...