Forests are widely believed to provide a water purification service that reduces the cost of treating drinking water, but few empirical economic studies have investigated this service in developing countries, where deforestation rates and thus threats to the service tend to be higher than in...

Each year, about 2.8 million people die due to problems with poor water supply, sanitation and hygiene. Over three-quarters of the dead are children. Some argue that a human right to clean water would improve this situation. This paper shows that human rights are not sufficient to improve access...

Absolute poverty has dropped markedly in Bulgaria but income inequality has increased substantially in the aftermath of the GFC. This increase is due to a rise in market income inequality that was compounded by a reduction in fiscal redistribution. The redistributive role of direct taxation has...

Choice defaults are an increasingly popular public policy tool. Yet there is little knowledge of the distributional consequences of such nudges for different groups in society. We report results from an elicitation study in the residential electricity market in Switzerland in which we contrast...

Fifty years ago, President Lyndon B. Johnson declared the War on Poverty. Since then, the federal tax code has been a fundamental tool in providing financial assistance to poor working families. Even today, however, thirty-two million children live in families that cannot support basic living...

We introduce a new class of generalized measures of relative deprivation. The class takes the form of a power mean of order p . A characteristic of the class is that depending on the value of the proximity-sensitive parameter p , the class is capable of accommodating both a decreasing weight...

We introduce a new class of generalized measures of relative deprivation. The class takes the form of a power mean of order p . A characteristic of the class is that depending on the value of the proximity-sensitive parameter p, the class is capable of accommodating both a decreasing weight (the...

In this paper we shall be analyzing gradual poverty reducing reforms for monetary transfers in Belarus. Some evidence is offered in support of the claim that the effectiveness of the existing 'categorical' system of transfers might be improved by redirecting resources to specific groups of...

This paper summarizes trends and driving factors in income distribution and poverty in 21 OECD Member countries analysing separately the working- and the retirement-age populations. There has been no generalized long-term trend in the distribution of disposable household incomes since the...

This chapter reviews definitional issues that arise in assessing the extent of, and change in, poverty in western industrialized countries, including the choice of resource, level of poverty line and appropriate adjustments for the size and type of the income-sharing unit. The chapter also...