This paper illustrates how Crossing Generalised Lorenz (GL) curves can be used to identify the best income distribution on social welfare grounds within a set of alternative income distributions generated by different policy options. It starts by illustrating two alternative income distributions...

The impact of increased affluence on life satisfaction is a matter of some controversy. This paper examines the impact of the recent economic boom in Ireland upon the level and distribution of various domains of well-being. There is evidence of a substantial increase in life satisfaction in the...

As shown empirically for many transition economies, even small changes in assumptions on economies of size and adult equivalence scales are likely to produce significant changes in the analysis of poverty and its distribution across households and individuals. Since such exercises are then used...

This paper extends familiar results on the optimal pricing of publicly provided goods and price cap regulations in a stochastic dominance framework. The key advantage is that the assessment as to whether pricing or price cap reforms are poverty reducing or welfare improving is not contingent on...

The author wants to note that welfare reform is but one part of what is happening politically to gender relations, to women, and to poor mothers, even within the system of income support, in the United States. Of particular importance within income support is the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC),...

The objective of this paper is to develop an index of economic weel-being for Canada for the period 1971 to 1997 using a framework originally laid out by Osberg (1985). Although the economic well-being of a society depends on the level of average consumption flows, aggregate accumulation of...

The "new politics of the welfare state", the term coined by Pierson (1996) to differentiate between the popular politics of welfare expansion and the unpopular politics of retrenchment, emphasizes a number of factors that distinguish countries in their capacity to pursue contentious measures and...

The objective of this paper is to develop an index of economic weel-being for Canada for the period 1971 to 1997 using a framework originally laid out by Osberg (1985). Although the economic well-being of a society depends on the level of average consumption flows, aggregate accumulation of...

When measuring poverty over time analysts must choose the value of the income elacticity of the poverty line. The choice of this paremeter is ultimately a value judgement but this paper suggests an approach which has some empirical basis. Borrowing from the life-style and deprivation approach to...

Results from poverty studies are sensitive to the choice f the poverty line. Poverty dominance analysis uses stochastic dominance to provide rankings of distributions in terms of poverty which are not sensitive to the choice of poverty lines or which at least give an unambiguous results over a...