PROGRESA (Programa de Educacion, Salud y Alimentacion) is an innovative Mexican program that provides cash transfers to poor rural households, on condition that their children attend school and their family visits local health centers regularly. Confronted with rising poverty after the economic...

This paper proposes a social welfare framework in which to analyze the relationships between growth, trends in inequality, mobility, and social welfare. An application of the framework to worldwide and regional data on per capita GDP suggests a lack of convergence at the world level, opposite...

A framework is provided for assessing the impact of social programs on welfare using two summary statistics: the mean benefit of the program and a distributional term (the Gini income elasticity of the program). The distributional term is itself decomposed into two components. The first...

In a relative deprivation framework, unless inequality is reduced, growth is associated with both higher satisfaction and higher deprivation. This may help explain the discontent with growth despite its benefits. As is well known in the literature, knowledge of the population's mean income and...

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...