The world food situation has significantly improved over the latest decades. Fears of an impending global food crisis have largely vanished. Along the last 40 years world population grew by 98% but food supply increased by 155%. Per capita food availability grew at an annual rate of about 0.5%...

This paper provides a non-technical account of poverty measurement at the local, national, and global levels. The political and scientific bases for measurement are discussed, as are the main strengths and weaknesses of the usual methods for poverty measurement

Amartya Sen's famous study of famines found that people died not because of a lack of food availability in a country but because some people lacked entitlements to that food. Is a similar situation now the case for global poverty, meaning that national resources are available but not being used...

We assess whether global social welfare has improved in the last decades despite (or because of) the substantial increase in global population. We use for this purpose a relatively unknown but simple and attractive social evaluation approach called critical-level generalized utilitarianism...

Employing panel data techniques, we investigate the macroeconomic and institutional determinants of inequality and poverty in the EU over the period 1994–2008. We pay particular attention to the effects of macroeconomic environment, social protection and labour market institutions. The...

Despite significant progress towards the Millennium goals, more than one billion people live on less than 1.25 US dollars per day. Previous research suggests that globalization stimulates poverty reduction, but does not investigate what role institutions play in this relationship. Theoretically,...

A new book on measuring global poverty by the late Tony Atkinson was published in 2019 by Princeton University Press. We describe how we edited the incomplete manuscript that Atkinson left at his death, the additions we made (which include afterwords by François Bourguignon and Nick Stern), and...

This paper investigates the relationship between competition law and income inequality using ‎panel data techniques for a large sample of countries over the period 1960–2010. Applying ‎our analysis to a World sample and OECD countries, we find consistent evidence of a ‎negative, and in...

This study investigates how enhancing gender inclusion affects inequality in 42 African countries for the period 2004-2014. The empirical evidence is based on the Generalized Method of Moments. Three inequality indicators are used, namely, the: Gini coefficient, Atkinson index, and Palma ratio....

The deterioration of income inequality is frequently to be found among the suggested negative side-effects of globalization – ‘the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer'. How relevant is this perception? In my opinion, the question can be properly answered only after:1) a careful overview...