Poverty dominance analysis uses stochastic dominance to provide rankings of distributions in terms of poverty which are not sensitive to the choice of poverty line. This analysis is carried out for Ireland using Household Budget Survey data for 1987 and 1994 including tests for the statistical...

This paper examines the conjecture that tax reform recommendations are not as sensitive to underlying consumer demand systems as are derived optimal tax rates. Tax reform recommendations for Ireland using the Ahmad-Stern model of indirect tax reform with different underlying consumer demand...

Forecasting the Public Finances and the Macroeconomic Context for Budget 2003: by Adele Bergin, David Duffy, John Eakins & Daniel McCoy This first paper outlines the macroeconomic context in which the Budget is set and attempts to discern the appropriate fiscal stance for 2003. The authors see...

Most analyses of wage discrimination have followed the traditional Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition of wage differences into endowment and discrimination components. This approach has neglected the possibility of wage discrimination at point of entry to the labour market and also the issue of...

This paper examines the change in welfare in Ireland over the 1987- 1994 period by investigating whether Lorenz and Generalised Lorenz dominance can be observed for household expenditure data. It also calculates bootstrapped standard error measures for Lorenz and Generalised Lorenz curves and...

The General Health Questionnaire (GHQ) is frequently used as a measure of mental well-being with those people with values below a certain threshold regarded as suffering from mental stress. Comparison of mental stress levels across populations may then be sensitive to the chosen threshold. This...

When measuring health inequality using ordinal data, analysts typically must choose between indices specifically based upon ordinal data and more standard indices using ordinal data which has been transformed into cardinal data. This paper compares inequality rankings across a number of...