This paper undertakes an assessment of the evolution of inequality in the distribution of consumption expenditure in India over the last quarter-century, from 1983 to 2009-10, employing data available in the quinquennial 'thick' surveys of the National Sample Survey Office. We find that...

Conventional approaches to the measurement of income-poverty require the ability to identify the poor by reference to a specified poverty line. On the face of it, it may appear to be unproblematic to specify such a poverty line. There are, however, analytical and conceptual difficulties entailed...

This paper analyzes how changing the expected length of intellectual property right (IPR) protection affects growth and the welfare of rich and poor consumers. The analysis is based on a product-variety model with non-homothetic preferences and endogenous markups in which, in accordance with...

We study a model of endogenous growth where firms invest both in product and process innovations. Product innovations (that open up completely new product lines) satisfy the advanced wants of the rich. Subsequent process innovations (that decrease costs per unit of quality) transform the...

Political violence, coup d’état, civil wars and inter-state wars, all have fiscal dimensions (and sometimes fiscal causes). Who gets what—public employment and public spending—and who has to pay for it, are questions that raise fundamental issues about the distribution of society's...

If the poor are to benefit from economic growth, then they need the skills that are in growing demand, and the capacity to raise their productivity as smallholder farmers and micro-entrepreneurs. Yet, the poor seldom receive a satisfactory education. Too little is spent on primary...

Inequality has risen in many countries over the last two decades, especially in the transition economies, but also in many developing and developed economies. This is disturbing since little progress can be made in poverty reduction when inequality is high and rising. Moreover, contrary to...

Research background: Applied welfare economics offers various social welfare functions (SWF) for appraising income distributions. Social planners commonly use two SWFs: SWFε implied by income inequality aversion (ε) and SWFv implied by rank inequality aversion (v). However, a voluntary...

Granular spatial information on the distributions of human population is relevant to a variety of fields like health, economics, and other areas of public sector planning. This paper applies ensemble methods and aims at assessing their applicability to analyzing and forecasting population...

This article analyzes the effect of population sorting on economic growth. The analysis is performed in a two-region growth model with endogenous fertility, in which public knowledge spillovers from the more advanced core into children's human capital accumulation function in the periphery are...