Many countries have adopted energy policies that promote biofuels as a substitute for gasoline in transportation. For instance, more than 40% of U.S. grain is now used for energy and this share is expected to rise under the current Renewable Fuels Mandate. This paper examines the distributional...

Many countries have adopted energy policies that promote biofuels as a substitute for gasoline in transportation. For instance, more than 40% of U.S. grain is now used for energy and this share is expected to rise under the current Renewable Fuels Mandate. This paper examines the distributional...

The paper traces the evolution the concept of socioeconomic vulnerability to climate change has followed in the academic and scientific debate. The recent recognition of vulnerability as a social construction has shifted the focus of the analysis on the dimension of adaptive capacity, i.e. the...

Unter Berücksichtigung neuer Informationen zu regionalen Preisniveaus in Deutschland fallen die realen Einkommensunterschiede zwischen West- und Ostdeutschland geringer aus als bisher berechnet. Nach Daten des Sozio-oekonomischen Panel (SOEP) und den vom Bundesamt für Bauwesen und Raumordnung...

This paper estimates the number of poor in various countries in Asia by applying an "amalgam poverty line", which is a weighted average of an absolute poverty line (such as $1.25 per day or $1.45 per day) and a reference income (such as the mean or the median income). The number of poor is...

Growing inequality is one important problem for a developing country, and Indonesia is no exception. Narrowing the gap between those at the top and the bottom of income distribution has become one of the government's main concerns. To achieve this goal, the sources of income inequality must be...

This paper is concerned with concepts - poverty, inequality, affluence, and polarization - that are typically treated in different literatures. Our aim here is to place them within a common framework and to identify the way in which different classes of income transfers contribute to different...

A key challenge for policymakers is how to design methods to select beneficiaries of social programs when income is volatile and the target population is dynamic. We evaluate a traditional static proxy-means test (PMT) and three policy-relevant alternatives. We use a unique panel dataset of a...

Empirical evidence on distributional preferences shows that people do not judge inequality as problematic per se but that they take the underlying sources of income differences into account. In contrast to this evidence, current measures of inequality do not adequately reflect these normative...

Using newly comprehensive data and tools from the Global Consumption and Income Project or CGIP, covering most of the world and five decades, we present a portrait of the changing global distribution of consumption and income and discuss its implications for our understanding of inequality,...