This paper takes advantage of a new source of information – the Gallup World Poll 2006 – to estimate and characterize income poverty and inequality in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) at the country level, and to compare LAC estimates to those in other regions of the world. The Gallup...

This paper evaluates transport consumption inequalities among French households, investigates their temporal dynamics, and estimates the redistributive effects of taxes on different commodity categories. A decomposition by expenditure component of the Gini coefficient is applied, using...

Kakwani decomposition of redistributive effect into vertical and reranking terms is one of the most widely used tools in measurement of income redistribution. However, Urban (2009) argues that the decomposition features some methodological problems and calls for its reinterpretation. This paper...

This paper attempts to explicitly integrate the idea of reference group when measuring relative deprivation. It assumes that in assessing her situation in society an individual compares herself with individuals whose environment can be considered as being similar to hers. By environment we mean...

Latin America is well known as the most inequitable region. As it is recognized, inequality and corruption perception weaken the way that political institutions works and the democratic system. Focusing on Latin American and Caribbean countries, we analyze what are the elements that shape tax...

Although the majority of research on US income inequality trends is based on public-use March CPS data, a new wave of research using IRS tax return data reports substantially higher levels of inequality and faster growing trends. We show that these apparently inconsistent estimates are largely...

We study the difference between the ex post and the ex ante perspectives in equality of opportunity (EOp), and the possibility of a clash between them. We argue that ex ante EOp is a potential trap because someone motivated by ex post EOp may be led to believe that ex ante EOp is another natural...

This paper presents a tax-benefit incidence analysis for a large time period. The objective is to know if has been income redistribution across Mexican households during the last twenty years, since during this period the Mexican economy has suffered important structural changes and as well its...

This paper presents empirical results of a wide range of multidimensional poverty measures for: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, El Salvador, Mexico and Uruguay, for the period 1992–2006. Six dimensions are analysed: income, child attendance at school, education of the household head, sanitation,...

This paper attempts to combine the analysis of wage (income) polarization with that of wage (income) mobility. Using the polarization index PG recently proposed by Deutsch et al. (2007) it shows that, when taking the identity of the individuals into account (working with panel data), a...