This paper proposes techniques to test for whether growth has been pro-poor. We first review different definitions of pro-poorness and argue for the use of methods that can generate results that are robust over classes of pro-poor measures and ranges of poverty lines. We then provide statistical...

An experiment with the hawk-dove game showed that if players observe solely an arbitrary and trivial characteristic of their opponent (e.g. a colour label assigned randomly to each player at the outset), a pattern of discrimination may evolve (i.e. those possessing one of the two colours will...

Households in developing countries adopt livelihood strategies that often rely on income from a diversity of sources. From a policy perspective it therefore becomes important to understand the relative importance of income sources in driving inter-household inequality and poverty.

The purpose of this note is to build an ethical inequality index which explicitely takes into account the social attitude towards inequlaity, through the actual tax scheme. We give a rough empirical application of this subjective inequality index to the evolution of wage inequality in France...

In a previous paper, Abouda and Chateauneuf proved that for RDEU maximizing MM with non-increasing marginal utility, positivity of the bid-ask spread can be identified with a very weak form of risk aversion SMRA. We perform here a more thorough study of SMRA, firstly in a general setting, and...

We investigate the problem of how to make welfare comparisons of income distributions hen a population allocation problem (how a population should be optimally divided over families for given resources) adds to the usual income allocation problem. Pro-family and anti-family stances are...

When incomes are exogenously given, a progressive tax structure reduces inequality in the sense that the Lorenz curve of after tax incomes is nowhere below that of before tax incomes whatever the circumstances as it was shown by U. Jakobsson (Journal of Public Economics 5 (1976), 161-168) The...

We study the possibility of making social evaluations independently of individual preferences over non-consumed commodities. This is related to the well-known problem of performing international comparisons of standard of living across countries with different consumption goods. We prove...

This paper examines inequality in Australia using four Household Expenditure Surveys (HES) between 1975/76 and 1993/94, from the Australian Burau of Statistics (ABS). The effects on inequality of the choice of welfare variable, equivalence scale and price index are examined.