This paper proposes a class of decomposable poverty measures. It incorporates ideas of flexible minimum basic requirement norms, relative deprivation and the presence of public transfer systems. Public transfers oftentimes take the form of implicit transfers and are not usually reflected in the...

Welfare states are struggling with slow economic and job growth, fiscal pressures from rising benefit costs, demographic changes, and fears of structural economic transformation and job losses caused by information technology and computerization. This combination of factors has led some analysts...

The main problem of this article is the basic income guarantee in the perspective of institutional economics. The author evaluates theoretical literature considering the topic and discusses past empirical research. The predicted and the actual outcomes of the programme are compared and...

A substantial literature addresses the design of transfer programs and policies, including the negative income tax, other means-tested transfers, the earned income tax credit, categorical assistance, and work inducements. This work is largely independent of that on the optimal nonlinear income...

Bourguignon and Fields ("Poverty Measures and Anti-Poverty Policy") and Gangopadhyay and Subramanian ("Optimal Budgetary Intervention in Poverty Alleviation Schemes") have derived optimal budgetary rules for the redress of poverty through direct income transfers when poverty is measured by the...

In the presence of means tested basic income for old age, households will tend to reduce precautionary savings to an inefficiently low level. We explore how this might serve as a justification for a compulsory public pension system. In a representative agent framework with two income types,...

The economic literature often argues that basic income schemes and low wage subsidies to employees are just special cases of a negative income tax. In this debate, it is ignored that these concepts target different population subgroups. This paper investigates the different target groups and the...