The starting point in the paper is the relative concept of poverty. We will study how our picture of poverty will change if we accept a very relative concept of poverty. The first problem we encountered was the selection of the benchmark. A couple of alternative ways to conduct relativizations...

Empirical analyses of economic inequality, poverty, and mobility in Germany are, to an increas-ing extent, using microdata from the German Federal Statistical Office's contribution to the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) as well as data from the German...

We show that the choice of the welfare measure has a substantial impact on the degree of welfare-related health inequality. Combining various income and wealth measures with different health measures, we calculate 80 health concentration indices. The influence of the welfare measure is more...

Total household income inequality can be very different from inequality measured at the income per-capita level but only in recent years has the patter of this divergence been investigated. In this paper, result form Coulter et al. (1992) using a one-parameter equivalence scale are updated using...

This paper develops the link between poverty and inequality by focusing on a class of poverty indices (some of them well-known) which aggregate normative concerns for absolute and relative deprivation. The indices are distinguished by a parameter that captures the ethical sensitivity of poverty...

This study offers will try to present some empirical evidence in an attempt to improve our understanding of welfare. After reviewing the empirical criteria used to measure welfare in comparative contexts and explaining our methodology (section 2), section 3 deals with major trends in some OECD...

A preliminary step in the measurement of inequality regards the choice of the index to use. Several indices exist, each one responding to a built-in aversion to inequality, and the choice affects conclusions. But how much? And in which way? We test the ranking correlation between inequality...

This paper explores, in the context of the Atkinson inequality measure, attempts to make interpretations of orders of magnitude transparent. One suggestion is that the analogy of sharing a cake among a very small number of people provides a useful intuitive description for people who want some...

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...