This paper updates and extends my earlier work (published in the June 2007 issue of the Journal of Economic Issues on how the middle class fares throughout the world. Wave #6 data from the Luxembourg Income Study, recently released and centered around 2004, provides an opportunity to assess what...

The paper investigates the effectiveness of the median voter as a decisive agent in the process of redistribution. According to the previous literature, it tests several assumptions finding interesting results: The positive relation between inequality and redistribution is confirmed, but the...

This paper updates and extends my earlier work, published in the Journal of Economic Issues, on how the middle class fares throughout the world. My 2007 paper provided a definition of the middle class as well as estimates of the size of the middle class in several nations. It argued that the...

The first decade of the 21st century witnessed an historic reduction in global poverty and a near doubling of the number of people who could be considered middle income. But the emergence of a truly global middle class is still more promise than reality. In 2011, a majority of the world's...

This paper shows how to compare the size of the middle class in income distributions using a polarization index that do not account for identification. We derive a class of polarization indices where the antagonism function is constant in identification. The comparison of distributions using an...

The paper draws on the LIS data to describe the socio-economic situation of the Middle Classes for a selection of European countries over the last 30 years. The LIS data were used as they cover a wide range of countries, including not only European countries, but also American and Asiatic...

This research aims to compare different methods of measuring the middle class in middle-income countries. I compare income-based measures to socio-economic measures, using both per capita and equivalized incomes. First I calculate the size of the middle class using the different measures in six...

We examine the effects of globalization on the size and composition of tax revenues, worker-specific tax burdens, and effective average labor income tax rates using a unique international database on income tax calculators. We find that due to increasing mobility of firms and high-income...

In the context of economic and financial difficulties, the debate over the effect of income taxation and redistribution has come back in most of the European countries. In this paper, we use the LIS data to examine the impact of income redistribution on middle class households from a...

This paper examines the evolution of the breadth and target of social policy in the US. By analyzing LIS household data from the US, the paper brings fresh evidence to longstanding debates over how inequality influences income redistribution, whether a welfare retrenchment has occurred, and...