A widely accepted criterion for pro-poorness of an income growth pattern is that it should reduce a (chosen) measure of poverty by more than if all incomes were growing equiproportionately. Inequality reduction is not generally seen as either necessary or sufficient for pro-poorness. As shown in...

Offers geometric and mathematical techniques for measuring and computing three effects known as the vertical, horizontal, and reranking effects: taxes may treat equals unequally; taxes may treat unequals unequally; and taxes may cause the ranking of people from poor to rich to be different...

This article provides empirical estimates of the redistributive impact of U.S. personal income tax over the period 1979-1990. The estimates are based on tax return data compiled from the Ernst and Young/University of Michigan tax research database. The authors employ the Gini coefficient...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationships between measures of ethnic and religious heterogeneity on the one hand and measures of inequality and redistribution on the other, using state-level US data. Design/methodology/approach – The relationship between...

Given an objective to exploit cross-sectional micro data to evaluate the distributional effects of tax policies over a time period, the practitioner of public economics will find that the relevant literature offers a wide variety of empirical approaches. For example, studies vary with respect to...

Poverty reduction has emerged as a fundamental objective of development and hence a metric for assessing the aggregate performance of public policy. Declaring a policy outcome pro-poor on the basis of changes in an aggregate indicator may hide more than it reveals about the heterogeneity of...

The `Vast majority of incomes ratio (VMIR)' $R_0$ is the ratio of the average income $\mu_0$ of a poorest majority $p_0$ of the population to the overall average income $\mu$. Another measure of equality is $E_0\equiv(1-G)$ where $G$ is the Gini coefficient of inequality of the distribution....

In situations where an adverse social outcome affects disadvantaged and advantaged groups in society differently, the rates at which those groups experience favorable or adverse outcomes tend to be systematically related to the overall prevalence of the outcome. Specifically, as the overall...

The structural progression of an income tax schedule measures how liabilities change with changes in the income being taxed. This paper extends the measurement of structural progression to a pure-form dual income tax (DIT) system, which combines progressive taxation of labour income with...