Background: Since the latter part of the 20th Century, countries have been particularly challenged by the trade-off that exists between delivering generous welfare provisions and strong economic growth. Such dynamics have stimulated a need to better understand the causes of income inequality so...

Together with the economic transition, in China the return to education and the skill premium increased; this phenomenon was deeply demonstrated by a large number of studies identifying it with one of the main cause of the increasing inequalities at national, regional and sector level. For this...

A multidimensional poverty assessment requires a weighting scheme to aggregate the well-being dimensions considered. We use Alkire and Foster’s (2011a) framework to discuss the channels through which a change of the weighting structure affects the outcomes of the analysis in terms of overall...

We argue that inter-country comparisons of income poverty based on poverty lines uniformly reflecting the costs of the basic requirements of human beings are superior to the existing money-metric approaches. In this exercise, we implement a uniform approach to poverty assessment based on basic...

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...

The reduction of poverty, and more recently inequality, are pressing concerns in many low- and middle-income countries, not in the least as a result of the Sustainable Development Goals committing countries to significant improvements by 2030. Redistribution is important for reaching these...