This paper proposes an alternative formulation for the Sen-Shorrocks index of poverty intensity for survey data with sampling weights, and decomposes the Sen-Shorrocks index into the poverty rate, the average poverty gap ratio among the poor, and the overall Gini index of poverty gap ratios....

This paper explores cross-national public perceptions and beliefs about taxes and redistribution of income. Our main concern is whether the welfare regimes and the national tax policies can explain attitudinal variance. Despite our larger database and somewhat different measures, our study array...

The median voter hypothesis has been central to an extensive literature on consequences of income distribution. For example, it has been proposed that greater inequality is associated with lower growth, because of the greater redistribution that is sought by the median voter when income...

This research considers the idea that a single metric expressing distance between social groups may be an adequate tool for investigating the relationship between ethnic/nationality minority group membership and social stratification. A Stereotyped Ordered Regression (SOR) model is proposed as a...

Despite serious methodological problems, quantitative studies of poverty by U.S. sociologists predominantly rely on the official U.S. measure. After reviewing the shortcomings of the official measure, this paper examines several econometric and theoretical advances in poverty measurement. In...

What is the distribution of real income within and across countries? The purpose of this paper is to try to answer this question by presenting estimates of the real purchasing power (PPP) parity-adjusted distribution of disposable income for a number of countries. The major tool for converting...

In combating poverty, whether or not to design a universal program or a targeted program has been a perpetual dilemma. The objective of this paper is to conduct an international comparison of the 'universality' and 'targeting' of social security systems. The paper presents an outline of...