The notion of Equality of Opportunity (EO) has pervaded much of economic and social justice policy over the last half century in conveying a sense of liberation from the circumstances that constrain an individual’s ability to achieve it, and it has been a cornerstone of many gender equality...

This paper examines the determinants of city growth in China. Evidence is provided that economic reforms played an important role in accelerating urban growth. The relative magnitude of the state sector has a negative impact on city growth and the city's openness to foreign direct investment has...

The problem considered here is that of dealing with the "incompleteness" property of Stochastic Dominance Orderings by quantifying the extent to which distributions differ when there is no dominant distribution at a given order. For example consider a policymaker's choice problem when facing a...

Classifying agents into subgroups in order to measure the plight of the "poor", "middle class" or "rich" is common place in economics, unfortunately the definition of class boundaries is contentious and beset with problems. Here a technique based on mixture models is proposed for surmounting...

Aphorisms that 'rising tides raise all boats' or that material advances of the rich eventually 'trickle down' to the poor are really maxims regarding the nature of stochastic processes that underlay the income/wellbeing paths of groups of individuals. This paper looks at the implications for the...

Aphorisms that "Rising tides raise all boats" or that material advances of the rich eventually "Trickle Down" to the poor are really maxims regarding the nature of stochastic processes that underlay the income/wellbeing paths of groups of individuals. This paper looks at the implications for the...

Atkinson (1987) proposed stochastic dominance criteria for analysing poverty which, under certain conditions, establish orderings of states for any poverty line and any poverty measure within given class, refocusing debate on the nature of the income distribution of the poor. Employing new...