Analysing a large sample of 1980 - 2004 unbalanced panel data, the current study presents comparative global evidence on the role of (income) inequality in poverty reduction. The evidence involves both an indirect channel via the tendency of high inequality to decrease the rate at which income...

The present study examines the degree to which income distribution affects the ability of economic growth to reduce poverty, based on 1990s data for a sample of rural and urban sectors of African economies. Using the basic needs approach, an analysis-of-covariance model is derived and estimated,...

The study presents recent global evidence on the transformation of economic growth to poverty reduction in developing countries, with emphasis on the role of income inequality. The focus is on the period since the early/mid-1990s when growth in these countries as a group has been relatively...

With income distributions it is common to encounter the problem of missing data. When a parametric model is fitted to the data, the problem can be overcome by specifying the marginal distribution of the observed data. With classical methods of estimation such as the maximum likelihood (ML) an...

Inequality measures are often used to summarise information about empirical income distributions. However , the resulting picture of the distribution and of the changes in the distribution can be severely distorted if the data are contaminated. The nature of this distortion will in general...

Lorenz curves and associated tools for ranking income distributions are commonly estimated on the assumption that full, unbiased samples are available. However, it is common to find income and wealth distributions that are routinely censored or trimmed. We derive the sampling distribution for a...

Statistical problems in modelling personal income distributions include estimation procedures, testing and model choice. Typically, the parameters of a given model are estimated by classical procedures such as maximum likelihood and least squares estimators. Unfortunately, the classical methods...

We show how a collection of results in the literature on the empirical estimation of welfare indicators from sample data can be unified. We also demonstrate how some of these ideas can be extended to empirically important cases where the data have been trimmed or censored.

Lorenz curves and second-order dominance criteria are known to be sensitive to data contamination in the right tail of the distribution. We propose two ways of dealing with the problem: (1) Estimate Lorenz curves using parametric models for income distributions, and (2) Combine empirical...

Distributional dominance criteria are commonly applied to draw welfare in- ferences about comparisons, but conclusions drawn from empirical imple- mentations of dominance criteria may be inßuenced by data contamination. We examine a non-parametric approach to reÞning Lorenz-type comparisons...