This paper explores cross-national public perceptions and beliefs about taxes and redistribution of income. Our main concern is whether the welfare regimes and the national tax policies can explain attitudinal variance. Despite our larger database and somewhat different measures, our study array...

The median voter hypothesis has been central to an extensive literature on consequences of income distribution. For example, it has been proposed that greater inequality is associated with lower growth, because of the greater redistribution that is sought by the median voter when income...

This research considers the idea that a single metric expressing distance between social groups may be an adequate tool for investigating the relationship between ethnic/nationality minority group membership and social stratification. A Stereotyped Ordered Regression (SOR) model is proposed as a...

Despite serious methodological problems, quantitative studies of poverty by U.S. sociologists predominantly rely on the official U.S. measure. After reviewing the shortcomings of the official measure, this paper examines several econometric and theoretical advances in poverty measurement. In...

What is the distribution of real income within and across countries? The purpose of this paper is to try to answer this question by presenting estimates of the real purchasing power (PPP) parity-adjusted distribution of disposable income for a number of countries. The major tool for converting...

Our objective in this paper is to assess how middle-income groups are faring with the global turn to the market. We suggest some simple measures of the middle-the size and income shares of households around the median (75/125%)-and their income status relative to wealthier counterparts. Our...

In combating poverty, whether or not to design a universal program or a targeted program has been a perpetual dilemma. The objective of this paper is to conduct an international comparison of the 'universality' and 'targeting' of social security systems. The paper presents an outline of...