Income mobility is often thought to equalize permanent incomes and, thereby, to improve social welfare. The welfare analysis of mobility often fails, however, to account for the cost of the variability of periodic incomes around permanent incomes. This paper assesses the net welfare benefit of...

This paper proposes a methodology for testing for whether tax reforms are pro-poor. This is done by extending stochastic dominance techniques to help identify tax reforms that will necessarily be deemed absolutely or relatively pro-poor by a wide spectrum of poverty analysts. The statistical...

Assessing the progressivity of a fiscal system is relevant to develop a global idea on the extent of redistribution. In this paper we assess the evolution of progressivity over time and how economic shocks and government fiscal policy affects its design. The social performance of fiscal...

The paper contributes to the measurement of poverty and vulnerability in three ways. First, we propose a new approach to separating poverty into chronic and transient components. Second, we provide corrections for the statistical biases introduced when using a small number of periods to estimate...

This paper explores the link between poverty and inequality through an analysis of the poverty impact of changes in income-component inequality and in between - an within - group inequality. This can help shed light on the theoretical and empirical linkages between poverty, growth and...

In this paper we provide a set of rules that can be used to check poverty or inequality dominance using discrete data. Existing theoretical rules assume continuity in incomes or in percentiles of the population. In reality, with the usual household surveys, this continuity does not exist....

The main aim of this paper is to explore the link between poverty and inequality. In developing countries, there is a general consensus that high inequality can dampen significantly the impact of economic performance on poverty. In this paper, we propose a new theoretical framework that links...