This paper is a review of the post-war literature on income distribution and development. It argues that the literature has cycled from one consensus to another, responding to emerging policy issues and new analysis. On the basis of the review, the paper identifies five areas that will command...

This paper points to flaws in Gini decompositions by income sources and population subgroups and to common pitfalls in the interpretation of decomposition results, focusing on methods within the framework of Rao (1969). We argue that within this framework Gini elasticities may provide the only...

The socioeconomic impact of spatial concentration has been receiving an increasing attention during the last two decades. Consequently, the necessity of effective measures of this phenomenon has increased too. This paper considers a population partitioned by subgroups and develops a...

This paper considers a partitioned population and develops a decomposition of the Gini index in two components, which measure the within and the between groups inequality. Differently from the most widespread inequality measure decompositions, having a between component that compares the means...

This paper considers a partitioned population and develops a decomposition of the Gini index in two components, which measure the within and the between groups inequality. Differently from the most widespread inequality measure decompositions, having a between component that compares the means...

The interest in the level of global inequality has surged in recent years. This paper complements existing estimates of global inequality by providing the first estimates of the level of bipolarization of the global income distribution. During 1975-2010, global bipolarization declined...

This paper attempts to explicitly integrate the idea of reference group when measuring relative deprivation. It assumes that in assessing her situation in society an individual compares herself with individuals whose environment can be considered as being similar to hers. By environment we mean...

OLS models are the predominant choice for poverty predictions in a variety of contexts such as proxy-means tests, poverty mapping or cross-survey imputations. This paper compares the performance of econometric and machine learning models in predicting poverty using alternative objective...

This paper reviews and assesses issues involved in the measurement of multidimensional poverty, in particular the soundness of the various “axioms” and properties often imposed on poverty indices. It argues that some of these properties (such as those relating poverty and inequality) may be...

Poverty prediction models are used by economists to address missing data issues in a variety of contexts such as poverty profiling, targeting with proxy-means tests, cross-survey imputations such as poverty mapping, or vulnerability analyses. Based on the models used by this literature, this...