A widely accepted criterion for pro-poorness of an income growth pattern is that it should reduce a (chosen) measure of poverty by more than if all incomes were growing equiproportionately. Inequality reduction is not generally seen as either necessary or sufficient for pro-poorness. As shown in...

Poverty reduction has emerged as a fundamental objective of development and hence a metric for assessing the aggregate performance of public policy. Declaring a policy outcome pro-poor on the basis of changes in an aggregate indicator may hide more than it reveals about the heterogeneity of...

The `Vast majority of incomes ratio (VMIR)' $R_0$ is the ratio of the average income $\mu_0$ of a poorest majority $p_0$ of the population to the overall average income $\mu$. Another measure of equality is $E_0\equiv(1-G)$ where $G$ is the Gini coefficient of inequality of the distribution....

The structural progression of an income tax schedule measures how liabilities change with changes in the income being taxed. This paper extends the measurement of structural progression to a pure-form dual income tax (DIT) system, which combines progressive taxation of labour income with...

Demographic disparities between the rates of occurrence of an adverse economic outcome can be observed to be increasing even as general social improvements supposedly lead towards the elimination of the adverse outcome in question. Scanlan (2006) noticed this tendency and developed a...

Social evaluation functions used in policy impact analysis can be viewed as real-valued functionals of the underlying outcome distributions. Influence functions may be used to identify the sources of variation in social outcomes in terms of individual or household characteristics. This paper...

A widely accepted criterion for pro-poorness of an income growth pattern is that it should reduce a (chosen) measure of poverty by more than if all incomes were growing equiproportionately. Inequality reduction is not generally seen as either necessary or sufficient for pro-poorness. Because...

What does an equal sacrifice tax look like in the case of a rank-dependent social welfare function? One's tax liability evidently becomes a function of one's income and one's position in the distribution in such a case, but not much else appears to be known. (Menahem Yaari touched upon the issue...

Using recently developed indices of fractionalization and polarization, we analyze the direct and indirect effects of ethnic and religious heterogeneity on income inequality and on welfare programs across US states. We find strong evidence (1) that there is a positive relationship between ethnic...