This paper provides an introductory review of the alternative possible income distributions which can be used when making cross-sectional evaluations of the effects of taxes and transfers using a household economic survey. This paper attempts to clarify the various alternatives, both for users...

This paper illustrates the effects of using different distributions and summary measures, using New Zealand data for the period 2007 to 2011. Using an annual accounting period, alternative welfare metrics and units of analysis are investigated. In addition, the sensitivity to assumptions about...

This note considers the problem of distributing a fixed amount of money (‘income’) among a given number of people, such that inequality (measured by either the Gini or Atkinson measure) takes a specified value. It is well known that simultaneous equations admit of many solutions where the...