This paper discusses housing condition in Tunisia in the late 1990s, using a housing condition indicator that relies on less arbitrary weights. Evidences from household survey data indicate that despite the substantial improvement of tunisian's housing condition between 1994 and 2001, great...

This research explores how regional socioeconomic variables affect the perception of social trust and support networks (PYCC) in Italian regions, and examines the implications for public policy designed to strengthen social cohesion. This study examines the variable "People You Can Count On"...

The previous research with incomplete data revealed that zemstva expenditure on education per capita were higher in regions with low level of education, but these spending did not make much of a difference – human capital in these regions remained relatively low (Popov, Konchakov, Didenko,...

Social stratification, segregation and inequity invite concerns about fairness and social harmony. Our game-theoretic and experimental results indicate that they can also be detrimental to productivity, efficiency, and welfare. Class is defined by players’ resources, incentives to make a...

In this paper, it is argued that many of the prescriptions of economic policy to promote growth and achieve development tend to be divergent because they use different moral assessment systems at heart. This happens because the economics cannot define welfare without resorting to any particular...

Should public policies address inequality due to heterogeneous life expectancy? Intuitively, taking short life as a disadvantage, such policies should favor those with high mortality. Yet, pension systems implicitly redistribute from low-life-expectancy to high-life-expectancy people. Moreover,...

This paper provides a review of part of the literature on inequality and social welfare, with a special focus on the Gini index. The paper first presents the extended Gini index used for measuring inequality, as well as the source decomposition of the Gini used to analyze how changes in income...

Do poor people benefit more or less than the nonpoor from an expansion in access to public services? And do those benefits depend on the existing level of access? Answering these questions is essential to strategies for empowering (or “investing in”) poor people, but the lack of panel data...

Japan’s national hospital system, which consists of a combination of private, national, prefectural and metropolitan hospitals, is the largest employers of the of the doctors. The article provides details on the women doctors’ discontinuous workforce participation in the Japanese hospital...

There has been a deep-rooted view that economic rents are the main cause of high levels of economic inequality, but if economic rents are temporary, they may not be the cause. By employing numerical simulations, I show that even if economic rents are temporary, they can generate a high level of...