The Association Agreement between Jordan and the EU entered into force in 2002. It provides a gradual reduction of import duties on EU products over a period of twelve years. In this paper we investigate the economic implications of induced trade liberalization on aggregate economic performance...

One of the most serious weaknesses of the human development index (HDI) is that it considers only average achievements and does not take into account the distribution of human development within a country or by population subgroups. All previous attempts to capture inequality in the HDI have...

Several measures of vulnerability to poverty have been suggested in the literature. In practise, only little is known about the robustness of vulnerability comparisons based on these often quite specific measures. The theory of stochastic orders can be applied to shed some light on such issues....

The decline of the middle class has been investigated as a principal aspect of social polarization (Wolfson 1994, 1997). Wang and Tsui 2000 have characterized a class of polarization measures by postulates on normalization, increasing spread and increasing bipolarity. The present paper...

This paper examines three possible approaches to pro-poor growth. The first one assumes that the poverty line remains constant in real terms over time. The second perspective examines the case where the poverty line is equal to half the median of the income distribution but assumes that such a...

This paper presents a new Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) for 104 developing countries. It is the first time multidimensional poverty is estimated using micro datasets (household surveys) for such a large number of countries which cover about 78 percent of the world's population. The MPI...

This paper deals with the economic effects and the policy implications of trade liberalisation on the Jordanian economy, with emphasis on welfare, income distribution and real wages of heterogeneous households, by using a neoclassical dynamic computable general equilibrium (CGE) model....

The most popular general univariate polarization indices for discrete (Esteban and Ray 1994), and continuous (Duclos, Esteban and Ray 2004) variables are combined and extended to describe the extent of polarization between agents in a distribution defined over a collection of many discrete and...

This paper proposes a multidimensional procedure for jointly assessing the absolute and relative pro-poorness of growth. It is also a procedure for testing whether poverty comparisons can be made over classes of indices that incorporate both absolute and relative views of poverty. Besides being...

The most popular general univariate polarization indexes for discrete and continuous variables are extended and combined to describe the extent of polarization between agents in a distribution defined over a collection of many discrete and continuous agent characteristics. A formula for the...