The extraordinary events that occurred in the country between 2001-2007, with a sharp decline in inequality and the levels of poverty and extreme poverty offers a unique opportunity to examine the most relevant factors to explain changes that benefit the poor and in different scenarios ? with...

This paper provides an assessment of how households’ income has fared compared with GDP. While the prime focus is on incomes around the median, attention is paid also to the bottom of the income distribution. Thus, one contribution of the paper is to deliver a fresh assessment of the evolution...

In many developing countries, there does not exist a time series of nationally repre- sentative household budget or income surveys, while there often are urban household surveys as well as nationally representative Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) which lack information on incomes. This...

In dieser Studie wird die Ungleichheit und Polarisierung der Einkommen in Deutschland in den letzten 30 Jahren untersucht. Neben der reinen eindimensionalen Einkommensbetrachtung wird dafür auch erstmals die Entwicklung der multidimensionalen Ungleichheit und Polarisierung von Einkommen und...

This paper shows how distance functions, a tool typically employed in production economics to measure the distance between a set of inputs and a set of outputs, can be employed to approximate a composite measure encompassing the many dimensions of well-being. It also illustrates how to implement...

Neither market income nor consumption expenditure provides an adequate picture of individual standard of living. It is time which enables and restricts individual activities and is a further brick to a more comprehensive picture of individual well-being. In our study we focus on a prominent part...

The deterioration of income inequality is frequently to be found among the suggested negative side-effects of globalization – ‘the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer'. How relevant is this perception? In my opinion, the question can be properly answered only after:1) a careful overview...

We review the literature on the rich, the affluent and the top incomes earners focusing on the determinants of affluence or richness. The review surveys empirical results about the composition of the income and wealth of the rich and its direct determinants, such as individual characteristics,...

The key challenge in making distributional comparisons with ordinal data is the lack of commensurability of the distances between the ordered categories. This chapter provides a critical review of the most recent theoretical developments addressing this challenge and providing methods for...

Im Lichte der Bundestagswahl widmet sich der IW-Verteilungsreport 2021 der Frage, ob die besonders in Wahlkampfzeiten oft bemühte Behauptung einer sich weiter öffnenden Einkommensschere zwischen Arm und Reich der Faktenlage standhält. Dazu wird neben der Entwicklung der Primärverteilung...