The authors respond to J. Banks and P. Johnson's (1994) comment on Coulter et al. (1992) drawing on a more general discussion of parametric equivalence scale and scale relativity issues and new empirical results. The authors show that criticisms of their earlier work are unfounded. When the...

The literatures on the assessment of income distributions and on differences in needs are not well integrated. The theoretical literature providing results about evaluations and comparisons of income distributions does not, in the main, consider the implications of non-income differences between...

Most inequality and poverty theory analyzes "equivalent income" distributions for homogeneous populations: incomes are assumed to be deflated by an equivalence scale that accounts for differences in needs between households. Yet in practice there is no consensus about what the appropriate...

The authors develop two simple measures of how much inequality is explained by individual population characteristics or groups of characteristics, analogous to R[superscript 2] in regression analysis. The authors investigate the measures' empirical implementation using several alternative...

We examine the specification and interpretation of the transfer principle in analysing income distributions. The early work by Pigou and Dalton on this topic left open the possibility of a variety of specifications and interpretation of the principle. The modern development of the theory since...

Drawing on recent work concerning the statistical robustness of inequality statistics we examine the sensitivity of poverty indices to data contamination using the concept of the influence function. We show that poverty and inequality indices have fundamentally different robustness properties,...

We examine the evidence on rank and income mobility in China during the decades immediately preceding and immediately following the millennium using panel data from the China Health and Nutrition Survey. We show that rank mobility changed markedly over the period: in this respect China is...

We examine the way in which across-the-board additions to incomes are perceived to change inequality. Using a questionnaire we investigate whether subjective inequality rankings correspond to the principle of scale-independence of translation-independence, or to some generalised concept of...

Is there a trade-off between people's preference for income equality and income mobility? Testing for the existence of such a trade-off is difficult because mobility is a multifaceted concept. We analyse results from a questionnaire experiment based on simple precise concepts of income...