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...

The first objective of our paper is to identify the determinants of income satisfaction in Spain, with one of these being relative deprivation, and the second is to measure this relative deprivation, in both monetary and satisfaction terms. To that end, we use data from the eight waves of the...

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...

The Gini coefficient features prominently in Amartya Sen’s 1973 and 1997 seminal work on income inequality and social welfare. We construct the Gini coefficient from social-psychological building blocks, reformulating it as a ratio between a measure of social stress and aggregate income. We...

Using four rounds (1999, 2002, 2005, 2008) of the Korean Labor and Income Panel Study (KLIPS), this article examines determinants of household income and consumption levels and inequalities. Unconditional as well as conditional stochastic dominance (SD) tests are performed by year, by household...

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...

The Gini coefficient features prominently in Amartya Sen's 1973 and 1997 seminal work on income inequality and social welfare. We construct the Gini coefficient from socialpsychological building blocks, reformulating it as a ratio between a measure of social stress and aggregate income. We...

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...

This study examines the impact of international economic sanctions, imposed on Iran due to its nuclear program, on the development of the middle class. Specifically, it investigates how the middle class in Iran would have developed in the absence of these sanctions post-2012. To address this...

Measurement of the middle class has recently come to the center of policy debate in middle-income countries as they search for the potential engines of growth and good governance. This debate assumes, first, that there is a meaningful definition of class, and second, that the thresholds which...