Poverty and inequality are often estimated from grouped data as complete household surveys are neither always available to researchers nor easy to analyze. In this study we assess the performance of functional forms proposed by Kakwani (1980a) and Villasenor and Arnold(1989) to estimate the...

This article conceives poverty in terms of the consumption of essential food, makes use of a new deprivation (or poverty) function, and examines the effects of changes in the mean and the variance of the income distribution on poverty, assuming a log-normal income distribution. The presence of a...

The Income Reference Period (IRP), the measurement period of income, differs across micro-economic databases of household or individual incomes; typically it is a year, a quarter (of a year) or a month. The length of the IRP affects the shape of the income distribution and derived distributional...

Accounting for environmental damage is relevant to how one measures the extent and severity of inequality and poverty, and the question of ecological distribution - how the costs associated with environmental damage are distributed across the population - is critical. Following Khan’s (1997)...

This article examines inequality and poverty among older people in Japan. It compares Japan with that of a sample of other OECD countries. Provisions within the social insurance system that enable old-age pensioners to work and draw incomes from labor explain some of the inequality and poverty...

This paper summarizes research on the relative level of intergenerational mobility – whether classified by income, education or social class. The literatures on education and income mobility reveal a similar ranking with South America, other developing nations, southern European countries and...

The distribution of family income reflects the distribution of personal income and the composition of families. We develop a non-parametric measure of the impact that changes in family income relationships have on the distribution of family income. Using data from Annual Social and Economic...

We examine individuals’ distributional orderings in a number of contexts. This is done by using a questionnaire-experiment that is presented to respondents in any one of seven “flavours” or interpretations of the basic distributional problem. The flavours include inequality, risk, social...

Inequality measurement involves explicit or implicit value judgements. The subjective approach to inequality measurement is a relatively new and fast-developing area which focueses direct attention on these judgements. It is 'subjective' in the sense that it takes accounts of peoples' views on...

Should raising the growth rate of GDP per capita be a policy goal of governments in general, and of the British government in particular? Many people would say no, for the following reasons: 1) GDP is hopelessly flawed as a measure of welfare; 2) Growing GDP is pointless since most people don’t...