Real GDP growth rate in developed countries is found to be a sum of two terms. The first term is the reciprocal value of the duration of the period of mean income growth with work experience, Tcr. The current value of Tcr in the USA is 40 years. The second term is inherently related to...

Drawing from the formal setting of the optimal tax theory (Mirrlees 1971), the paper identifies the level of Rawlsianism of some European social planners starting from the observation of real data and redistribution systems and uses it to build a metric that allows measuring the degree of...

Minimum income policies are policies aimed at guarantee all citizens with a minimum level of income and at fighting social exclusion typically associated with extreme poverty. Theoretically, their main shortcoming is the disincentive effect on labour market participation they could generate in...

The governments of nearly all countries are major providers of primary and secondary education to its citizens. In some countries, however, public schools coexist with private schools, while in others the government is the sole provider of education. In this study,we askwhy different...

New information and communication technologies, we argue, have been ‘power- biased’: they have allowed firms to monitor low-skill workers more closely, thus reducing the power of these workers. An efficiency wage model shows that ‘power-biased technical change’ in this sense may generate...

This essay describes the evolution of the Economics of Poverty from the seminal works of Charles Booth and Joseph Rowntree to the Rediscovering Era in the 1960’s. It shows how the leading objectives of its authors changed over the decades. The description is roughly exhaustive, pointing out...

Income is a poor indicator of welfare and should be use only as a as component of welfare. Wealth provides another dimension of well-being. We use the Kullback-Leibler Information Criterion (KLIC, hereafter) as a measure of the discrepancy between two attributes. This will allow economists and...

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the advantages and disadvantages of several intermediate inequality measures, paying special attention to whether inequality rankings between income distributions are affected by the monetary units in which incomes are expressed.

We review the literature on the links between inequality, growth and welfare. Three questions are addressed: 1) What is the impact of growth and development on inequality? 2) What is the impact of inequality on growth, development and welfare? 3) What is the impact of proequality public policies...

We propose and characterize a generalization of the classical linear index of individual deprivation based on income shortfalls. Unlike the original measure, our class allows for increases in the income of a higher-income individual to have a stronger impact on a person’s deprivation the...