Western governments increasingly place more emphasis on non-income dimensions in measuring national well-being (e.g. the UK, France). Not only averages, but the characteristics of the whole distribution (e.g. inequalities) are taken into consideration. Commonly used data such as life...

Colombia’s decentralization was conceived to improve population’s access to social services, reduce poverty and equalize well-being across the territory. However, after more than 20 years of its implementation a big gap across municipalities still remains. This paper analyses the impact of...

The academic literature on equality of opportunity has burgeoned. More recently, the concepts and measures have begun to be used by policy institutions, including in specific sectors like health and education. Indeed, it is argued that one advantage of focusing on equality of opportunity is that...

We develop a measure of unemployment that takes into account both the level and intensity of unemployment and that satisfies several desirable properties, including distribution sensitivity (dealing with differences among the unemployed). It can also be decomposed into mean and distributional...

To analyse the impacts of North-South globalization (NSG) and North-North globalization (NNG) upon social segmentation in advanced economies, we build a model in which (i) households differ in their skill and capital endowments, and (ii) there is a minimal consumption under which they are...

Skaperdas (1996) characterized the contest success function (CSF), which stipulates the winning probabilities of the contestants, using respectively the scale invariance and translation invariance axioms. This paper first characterizes the entire family of CSFs that fulfils a convex mixture of...

The multitude of available poverty measures can confuse a policy maker who wants to evaluate a poverty-reduction policy. We proposes a rule for ranking poverty measures by use of the food-gap, calculated as the cost-difference between a household’s normative food basket, derived from a healthy...

This paper examines the link between inequality and individual well-being using household survey data from 27 Transition Economies, where income inequality increased considerably since 1989. A test of inequality aversion in individual preferences that draws on the Fehr and Schmidt (QJE, 1999)...

In this paper we analyze the way in which changes in macro-economic circumstances and labour market institutions, that occurred in Italy over the ‘90s, affected the set of opportunities for young generations, amplify or shrinking existing inequalities. In particular we investigate whether they...

This paper proposes two related measures of educational inequality: one for educational achievement and another for educational opportunity. The former is the simple variance (or standard deviation) of test scores. Its selection is informed by consideration of two measurement issues that have...