A considerable literature exists on the measurement of income inequality in China and its increasing trend. Much less is known, however, about the driving forces of this trend and their quantitative contributions. Conventional decompositions, by factor components or by population subgroups, only...

This paper proposes a framework for incorporating longitudinal distributional changes into poverty decomposition. It is shown that changes in the Sen-Shorrocks-Thon index over time can be decomposed into two components—one component reflects the progressivity of income growth among the...

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...

In this paper we attempt to examine the role of social inequality and status effects in driving trade between two countries which differ systematically only in terms of income-distribution using a status-driven model of consumption involving a status and a non-status good. Our model illustrates...

This paper depicts the trend of regional inequality in rural China for the period 1985-2002. The total inequality is decomposed into the so-called within- and between-components when China is divided into three regional belts (east, central and west). A regression-based accounting framework is...

This paper contributes to qualifying the Basu-Mitra approach to the problem of intergenerational social choice, by analyzing the impact of the structure of the feasible set of utilities on Banerjee's (2006) impossibility theorem. We prove that if the utilities that each generation can possess...

In this work we analyse social welfare relations on sets of infinite utility streams that verify various types of liberal non-interference principles. Earlier contributions have established that (finitely) anonymous and strongly Paretian quasiorderings exist that agree with axioms of that kind...

The existing literature on poverty has discussed about the conflict between income-based measure and nutrition-based measure. However, the role of social inequality in influencing individual’s consumption and inducing greater consumption of the so called status good has been relatively...

We are concerned with the problem of aggregating infinite utility streams and the possible adoption of consequentialist equity principles when using numerical evaluations of the streams. We find a virtually universal incompatibility between the Basu-Mitra approach (that advocates for social...