measuring movement of incomes we consider a small set of elementary properties for income movement measures and show that there is essentially only one measure that satisfies all of these properties the per capita aggregate change in log incomes we demonstrate next that this movement mobility measure has a number of appealing descriptive and normative properties and provide a formal generalization of our basic characterization theorem drawing from the related literature on poverty measurement finally we present here an empirical application in which we show by using our new measure that there has been a broad based increase in income movement in the united states between the 1970s and 1980s

the economics of export performance requirements this paper analyzes the resource allocation and welfare effects of export performance requirements imposed on foreign investors it argues that a satisfactory analysis must consider the presence of tariff distortions and oligopolistic behavior in host country markets these create a second best environment in which an evaluation of the welfare effects of such requirements is no longer straightforward it is concluded that export requirements can improve home welfare by reducing payments to foreign capital reducing the output of commodities which are being overproduced and shifting profits toward domestically owned firms

quantitative restrictions and the welfare effects of capital inflows abstract this paper explores the welfare effects of capital inflows when some imports are subject to quantitative restrictions it is shown that in a heckscher ohlin model where all imports are restricted by quotas and some fraction of the initial domestic capital stock is foreign owned a capital inflow is welfare improving regardless of the ranking of sectoral factor intensities with sector specific capital stocks and both tariff ridden and quota restricted imports the consequences of direct foreign investment in any sector are uncertain and depend upon whether the two imports are compensated substitutes or complements as well as the characteristics of production

clean energy policy taxing carbon and the illusion of the equity objective abstract the australian government has passed legislation the clean energy future policy establishing a carbon emission pricing scheme while the scheme is represented as the most efficient and cost effective means of reducing emissions the government has also committed to ensuring equity in burden sharing particularly through the use of household compensation methods and by minimising the disadvantages faced by energy intensive trade exposed industries thereby committing to these industries continued developments treasury modelling used to determine the required level of household compensation has remained relatively uncontested we question the conclusion of equity in burden sharing on the basis of this modelling the modelling reflects fairly standard conventional economic theory in terms of market structures the determination of prices and outputs and the characterisation of factor markets the behavioural assumptions overstate the consumer and producer substitution possibilities failing to consider the possibility of technical reswitching and ignore the impact that oligopolistic market structures would have on price increases and infrastructure investment the full ramifications of compensation for overall government expenditure and therefore the capacity of the government to continue to fund a range of elements of the social wage the potential for unemployment and transitioning workers to less carbon intensive industries are also overlooked

tariffs capital export and immiserizing growth abstract the purpose of this paper is to show how the brecher diaz 1977 and minabe 1974 propositions on the capital inflow from a tariff apply symmetrically to capital outflow that is when the home country continues to import the labor intensive goods while remaining incompletely specialized the capital outflow must reduce the home country s real income this will be so when the net return to home capital is greater than the home value of its marginal product at internal prices but less than the home value of its marginal product at world prices

the coal question that emissions trading has not answered abstract can emissions trading assist with the task of placing a limit on coal production and consumption in australia this paper outlines a critical political economy perspective on coal and a flagship market mechanism for emissions reduction the prospects for an effective emissions trading scheme in coal dominated economies are considered in light of its theoretical justifications as well as recent attempts to price carbon in australia emissions trading is a weak instrument that does not address real world failures of coal governance at their theoretical best carbon prices produce marginal changes to the cost structure of production in practice the australian case demonstrates emissions trading is an attempt to displace the emissions reduction task away from coal through compensation arrangements and offsetting in light of the urgent need to rapidly reduce global emissions direct regulation and democratisation of coal production and consumption should be flagship climate policy

effects of foreign investment in the presence of unemployment abstract in this paper we present a simple model of unemployment in the presence of foreign investment in the traded sector more foreign investment increases employment in the nontraded sector but may or may not increase employment in the traded sector the effect on total employment is also ambiguous in a two country framework with foreign investment itself a variable we show that foreign investment should most likely be subsidized rather than taxed moreover the employment maximizing tax on foreign investment is shown to be less than the optimum tax

a study on the relationship between economic inequality and mobility abstract a significant positive relationship between inequality and income mobility key for the theory of political redistribution is found among the growth dispersion and exchange mobility components dispersion is the most important

weakly relative poverty prevailing measures of relative poverty are unchanged when all incomes grow or contract by the same proportion this property stems from seemingly implausible assumptions about the disutility of relative deprivation and the cost of social inclusion the authors propose weakly relative lines that relax these assumptions on calibrating our measures to national poverty lines and survey data we find that half the population of the developing world in 2005 lived in poverty only half of whom were absolutely poor the total number of poor rose over 1981 to 2005 despite falling numbers of absolutely poor with sustained economic growth the incidence of relative poverty became less responsive to further growth the number of relatively poor rose just as the numbers of absolutely poor fell

a poor means test econometric targeting in africa proxy means testing is a popular method of poverty targeting with imperfect information in a now widely used version a regression for log consumption calibrates a proxy means test score based on chosen covariates which is then implemented for targeting out of sample in this paper the performance of various proxy means testing methods is assessed using data for nine african countries standard proxy means testing helps filter out the nonpoor but excludes many poor people thus diminishing the impact on poverty some methodological changes perform better with a poverty quantile method dominating in most cases even so either a basic income scheme or transfers using a simple demographic scorecard are found to do as well or almost as well in reducing poverty however even with a budget sufficient to eliminate poverty with full information none of these targeting methods brings the poverty rate below about three quarters of its initial value the prevailing methods are particularly deficient in reaching the poorest

who wants to redistribute the tunnel effect in 1990s russia abstract support for governmental redistribution tended to be greater for the poor than the rich in a representative sample of russian adults in 1996 however support for redistribution is higher amongst those who expect their welfare to fall and this effect is strongest amongst the currently well off a rising trajectory inhibits demand for redistribution support is also stronger in rural areas amongst those with less schooling those who fear losing their job the elderly and amongst women our results are consistent with albert hirschman s idea of a tunnel effect whereby prospects of mobility in both directions influence demand for governmental redistribution

supply and demand shocks in the covid 19 pandemic an industry and occupation perspective we provide quantitative predictions of first order supply and demand shocks for the us economy associated with the coronavirus disease 2019 covid 19 pandemic at the level of individual occupations and industries to analyze the supply shock we classify industries as essential or non essential and construct a remote labor index which measures the ability of different occupations to work from home demand shocks are based on a study of the likely effect of a severe influenza epidemic developed by the us congressional budget office compared to the pre covid period these shocks would threaten around 22 per cent of the us economy s gross domestic product gdp jeopardise 24 per cent of jobs and reduce total wage income by 17 per cent at the industry level sectors such as transport are likely to have output constrained by demand shocks while sectors relating to manufacturing mining and services are more likely to be constrained by supply shocks entertainment restaurants and tourism face large supply and demand shocks at the occupation level we show that high wage occupations are relatively immune from adverse supply and demand side shocks while low wage occupations are much more vulnerable we should emphasize that our results are only first order shocks we expect them to be substantially amplified by feedback effects in the production network

global inequality of opportunity how much of our income is determined by where we live suppose that all people in the world are allocated only two characteristics over which they have almost no control country of residence and income distribution within that country assume further that there is no migration the authors show that more than one half of variability in income of world population classified according to their household per capita in one percent income groups by country is accounted for by these two characteristics the role of effort or luck cannot play a large role in explaining global distribution of income

immiserizing investment from abroad the singer prebisch thesis reconsidered the present paper lends new analytical support to the controversial singer prebisch thesis according to this well known thesis less developed countries ldcs suffer a welfare loss from secular decline in their international terms of trade for primary product exports the standard theoretical criticism of the thesis makes two basic arguments both relating to the impact of economic expansion 2 first there is no well established presumption that the terms of trade for primary products will indeed deteriorate in a growing world economy second if domestic economic expansion does happen to worsen the terms of trade for ldcs economic welfare of these countries still need not deteriorate except under bhagwati s 1958 well known conditions for immiserizing growth thus the traditional critique sees the singer prebisch thesis as an unconvincing allegation about the relationship between growth and welfare via the terms of trade the following discussion suggests an alternative more favorable interpretation of the thesis this reinterpretation focuses upon the process of foreign investment4 rather than economic growth as the essential reason for adverse changes in the terms of trade and level of welfare for ldcs exporting primary products such a focus appears to be fully consistent with the analysis of singer 19501 5 whose main

capital and technology movements and economic welfare economists have long valued capital mobility as an aid to international efficiency robert mundell has shown that under certain conditions the capital movement induced by tariffs on goods will substitute for trade and enable the tariff impeded international economy to reach essentially the same equilibrium as would a completely free international economy it will also except possibly for the case when the optimal tariff is non zero benefit both countries but if perfect unlimited capital mobility is a good thing for the borrowing country it does not follow as this paper demonstrates that any limited amount of capital mobility however small is a good thing if the capital movement is due to discrepancies in returns due solely to a tariff then a small amount of capital inflow will actually diminish welfare in the recipient country thus countries which take a few cautious steps toward liberalization of capital flow may find their welfare diminished this conclusion is related to the intuitive notion that perhaps it might not be a good idea to allow only a few foreign investors to reap high rates of return in capital short countries if foreign investment is allowed enough should be allowed to depress the rate of return so that excessive profits are not taken otut of the country by a few privileged investors on the other hand however this paper shows that if differences in returns are due to a technological advantage in the capital importing country so that the country with initially high return to capital nonetheless exports the capital intensive good and if these differences in returns are accompanied but not caused by tariffs then even short hesitant steps toward liberalization of capital inflow will improve the borrowing country s welfare this paper also shows that the home country s welfare may be improved or diminished by importing the advanced country s technology when the home country levies a tariff and pays royalties for the technology the critical point is that a movement of technology may either increase or diminish economic welfare depending on whether the technological progress is of the capital saving type or of the labor saving type in the fixed production coefficients case in the same case when the technological progress is hicksian neutral technology inflow will reduce or have no effect on the home country s economic welfare depending on whether the foreign country s technological progress occurs in the home country s inmport competing or export industries similarly capital or technology inflow will never increase the borrowing country s welfare when the country specializes completely in a single industry some of these results should be modified when we treat the possibility that changes in factor prices alter factor proportions

welfare gains from capital inflows under import quotas abstract the presence of tariffs was assumed in the literature which examined the effect of additional foreign investment on the welfare of the host country in the small country setting however this paper analyzes the case of import quotas and shows that additional inflows of foreign capital improve the host country s welfare when import quotas are kept constant

the economics of climate change impacts a la stern novel and nuanced or rhetorically restricted abstract the stern report conducts an estimation of greenhouse gas control costs weighed against the benefits of avoiding damages at the global scale as i show stern and colleagues are aware of the limits to cba although they chose to ignore the considerable literature on the subject the many contributions by ecological economists and especially work specific to the enhanced greenhouse effect various problems are raised or mentioned in the report including strong uncertainty incommensurability plural values non utilitarian ethics rights distributional inequity poverty and treatment of future generations how then can this report acknowledging so many of those aspects of climate change that render cba an unsuitable tool for generating policy recommendations go ahead to conduct a global cba and make policy recommendations i explain how issues are suppressed and sidelined in a careful and methodical manner with the pretence they have been addressed by state of the art solutions meanwhile the authors maintain allegiance to an economic orthodoxy which perpetuates the dominant political myth that traditional economic growth can be both sustained and answer all our problems besides perpetuating myths this diverts attention away from alternative approaches away from ethical debates over harming the innocent the poor and future generations and away from the fundamental changes needed to tackle the very real and serious problems current economic systems pose for environmental systems

poverty and inequality under income and price dispersions many policies simultaneously affect the distribution of prices and incomes in the economy moreover a bias may occur when there is a stochastic relationship between prices and incomes and this relationship is being ignored it is therefore important to dispose of an analytical framework for welfare analysis that could account for changes in this joint distribution how can the joint influences of price and income distributions on poverty and inequality indicators be analysed we offer a method to deal with this problem by using parametric formulae of poverty and inequality measures we propose statistical indicators for the levels variabilities and a statistical link of price indices and nominal living standards these indicators are consistent with an approximation of the problem based on a bivariate lognormal distribution of price indices and nominal living standards our analysis provides hints about the social welfare impact of economic shocks or policies affecting levels variabilities and correlation of prices and incomes intuitive insights are obtained while using arithmetic means and variances instead does not lead to illuminating results the role of price and income variabilities for poverty and inequality is more complex than generally expected with the possibility of several variation regimes empirical investigation of these statistics would guide social policies

community comparisons and subjective well being in a divided society using a south african data set the paper poses six questions about the determinants of subjective well being much of the paper is concerned with the role of relative concepts we find that comparator income measured as average income of others in the local residential cluster enters the household s utility function positively but that income of more distant others others in the district or province enters negatively the ordered probit equations indicate that as well as comparator groups based on spatial proximity race based comparator groups are important in the racially divided south african society it is also found that relative income is more important to happiness at higher levels of absolute income potential explanations of these results and their implications are considered

a class of poverty indices a review of a number of well known poverty indices shows that two axiomatic requirements to a pover ty index are never satisfied simultaneously the choice between these two axioms depends on the nature of the poverty line a class of pov erty indices is developed as an application of the dalton and atkinso n inequality to poverty measurement almost all other poverty indices are seen to be a member of the class the formulation of this class clarifies the basic problems involved in poverty measurement copyright 1987 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

development crime and punishment accounting for the international differences in crime rates abstract this paper analyzes the determinants of the heterogeneity in crime rates across countries focusing on reporting rates and development the behavior of the reporting rate is studied by comparing data from victimization surveys to official records reporting rates are strongly correlated with development richer countries report a higher fraction of crimes the positive relation between development and crime found in previous studies is shown to result from this correlation once the presence of the reporting error is accounted for development does not affect crime reductions in inequality and increases in growth and education are associated with reductions in crime rates

income inequality in the united states 1913 1998 this paper presents new homogeneous series on top shares of income and wages from 1913 to 1998 in the united states using individual tax returns data top income and wages shares display a u shaped pattern over the century our series suggest that the large shocks that capital owners experienced during the great depression and world war ii have had a permanent effect on top capital incomes we argue that steep progressive income and estate taxation may have prevented large fortunes from fully recovering from these shocks top wage shares were flat before world war ii dropped precipitously during the war and did not start to recover before the late 1960s but are now higher than before world war ii as a result the working rich have replaced the rentiers at the top of the income distribution

import restrictions capital taxes and welfare this paper develops a two good small country general equilibrium model with trade restrictions i e a tariff an import quota or a voluntary export restraint ver inter national capital mobility and taxes on the rate of return to capital within this context it examines the price and welfare effects of capital taxes the second best policy towards capital in the presence of such trade restrictions and the welfare implications of trade liberalization in the presence of capital taxes the analysis demonstrates among other things that i the optimal policy towards capital is a zero tax when imports are quota constrained and is a tax under a tariff and a subsidy under a ver when the imported good is capital intensive and that ii an asymmetry exists between trade and capital movements liberalization under the various trade regimes

the developing world is poorer than we thought but no less successful in the fight against poverty a new data set on national poverty lines is combined with new price data and almost 700 household surveys to estimate absolute poverty measures for the developing world we find that 25 of the population lived in poverty in 2005 as judged by what poverty typically means in the world s poorest countries this is higher than past estimates substantial overall progress is still indicated the corresponding poverty rate was 52 in 1981 but progress was very uneven across regions the trends over time and regional profile are robust to various changes in methodology though precise counts are more sensitive

individual preferences for political redistribution what drives people s support of governmental reduction of income inequality we employ data from a large international survey in order to evaluate the explanatory power of three competing forces referred to as the homo oeconomicus effect the public values effect and the social rivalry effect the empirical analysis reveals that at the aggregate level all three effects play a significant role in shaping individual preferences for political redistribution attitudes of citizens in formerly socialist countries turn out to differ from those of western citizens in a systematic way 2002 elsevier science b v all rights reserved

poverty economic growth and average exit time a simple transformation of the watts poverty index yields a meaningful measure with appealing ordinal properties and a natural interpretation in terms of the potential for economic growth to alleviate poverty the index is illustrated with data from bangladesh and bolivia 1998 elsevier science s a

the welfare effects of capital inflow in the presence of a tariff quota with revenue premium seeking abstract the paper re examines the impact of capital inflow on the welfare of a small host nation in the presence of a tariff quota with revenue premium seeking it is demonstrated that the welfare impact of capital inflow is neutral in the case of a tariff with revenue seeking but ambiguous in the case of a quota with premium seeking

the curious attraction of wagner s law wagner s law of increasing state activity has recently been subjected to intensive use of recondite econometric testing procedures an examination of the relevant articles reveals ignorance both of wagner s definition of state activity and of his insistence that he was not engaged in prediction consequently the omission of public enterprises contained in wagner s definition leads to a model misspecification and the object of testing his hypothesiss remains obscure

lights camera income illuminating the national accounts household surveys debate gdp per capita and household survey means present conflicting pictures of the rate of economic development in emerging countries one of the areas in which the national accounts household surveys debate is key is the measurement of developing world poverty we propose a data driven method to assess the relative quality of gdp per capita and survey means by comparing them to the evolution of satellite recorded nighttime lights our main assumption which is robust to a variety of specification checks is that the measurement error in nighttime lights is unrelated to the measurement errors in either national accounts or survey means we obtain estimates of weights on national accounts and survey means in an optimal proxy for true income these weights are very large for national accounts and very modest for survey means we conclusively reject the null hypothesis that the optimal weight on surveys is greater than the optimal weight on national accounts and we generally fail to reject the null hypothesis that the optimal weight on surveys is zero additionally we provide evidence that national accounts are good indicators of desirable outcomes for the poor such as longer life expectancy better education and access to safe water and we show that surveys appear to perform worse in developing countries that are richer and that are growing faster therefore we interpret our results as providing support for estimates of world poverty that are based on national accounts jel code i32

ec members fighting about surplus vers fdi and japanese cars the distribution of consumer and producer surplus among ec members of three different trade regimes free trade a voluntary export restraint ver and a ver in conjunction with foreign direct inv

international factor movements commodity trade and commercial policy in a specific factor model two events in the decade of the 1970s had a major impact on world trade and factor movements the collapse of the bretton woods fixed exchange rate system and opec s success in raising petroleum prices the enormous current account surplus accruing to some of the opec members was successfully recycled by the international capital markets to among others the oil importing developing countries in addition the vastly increased tempo of investment in the capital rich labour poor opec members in west asia attracted migration of labour skilled as well as unskilled to these countries from some of the oil importing developing countries the remittances from these workers in turn eased the problem of the labourexporting countries in adjusting to the increased cost of oil imports thus both borrowing from private capital markets and export of labour became very important elements in cushioning the oil shock for a number of countries the post opec movements of labour and financial capital while dramatic are only the more recent instances of a phenomenon of much greater antiquity the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries saw vast migration of people out of europe though these movements were the result of conquests and colonization rather than movements from one sovereign state into another but the nineteenth century particularly the latter half saw migration of the latter kind from europe to countries of north and south america as well as capital investment by residents of europe in these

sleeping quotas pre emptive quota bidding and monopoly power abstract we rationalize the puzzling existence of binding quotas that are not fully utilized our model has its roots in bhagwati 1965 in r baldwin et al eds trade growth and the balance of payments essays in honor of g haberler mit press new york on tariffs quotas equivalence and is related to the io literature on preemption we study the conditions that lead a monopolist facing a quota restricted market to buy the quota licenses itself and the conditions under which they may remain unused the divisibility of the quota is crucial for the monopolist to pre emptively buy the quota furthermore we study the implications of use it orlose it clauses commonly imposed on auctioned quotas

the mdgs and exit time the case of the philippines this article evaluates whether the philippines will be able to halve the incidence of poverty between 1990 and 2015 using the concept of exit time and household level data we find that the philippines as a whole will not be able to comply with target 1 of the millennium development goals mdgs although 15 of its provinces will be able to do so these provinces are closer to manila characterized by higher per capita expenditure growth rates and had lower incidence of poverty in 1988 this suggests the importance of policies to mitigate the regional disparity in achieving the mdgs

when information dominates comparison abstract we propose a micro econometric evaluation of the relation between life satisfaction and income distribution using a balanced panel survey of the russian population russian longitudinal monitoring survey rlms running from 1994 to 2000 covering 4685 individuals we show that in the context of the very volatile russian environment hirschman s q j econ 87 1973 544 tunnel effect conjecture seems to be confirmed variables reflecting income distribution do not influence satisfaction through social comparisons individuals rather seem to use their informational content in order to form their expectations the reference group s income thereby exerts a positive influence on individual satisfaction which contrasts with other studies on the subject inequality indices do not affect individual welfare

the world distribution of income falling poverty and convergence period we estimate the world distribution of income by integrating individual income distributions for 138 countries between 1970 and 2000 country distributions are constructed by combining national accounts gdp per capita to anchor the mean with survey data to pin down the dispersion poverty rates and head counts are reported for four specific poverty lines rates in 2000 were between one third and one half of what they were in 1970 for all four lines there were between 250 and 500 million fewer poor in 2000 than in 1970 we estimate eight indexes of income inequality implied by our world distribution of income all of them show reductions in global inequality during the 1980s and 1990s

social mobility and the demand for redistribution the poum hypothesis this paper examines the often stated idea that the poor do not support high levels of redistribution because of the hope that they or their offspring may make it up the income ladder this prospect of upward mobility poum hypothesis is shown to be fully compatible with rational expectations and fundamentally linked to concavity in the mobility process a steady state majority could even be simultaneously poorer than average in terms of current income and richer than average in terms of expected future incomes a e rst empirical assessment suggests on the other hand that in recent u s data the poum effect is probably dominated by the demand for social insurance in the future everyone will be world famous for e fteen minutes andy warhol 1968

should export share requirements be implemented under quota protection in this paper the authors develop a model to analyze the effects of export share requirements when a quota is in place they show that when foreign capital is located in specific economic activity zones identified with the importable sector an increase in export share requirements reduces welfare owing to the price induced higher payments to foreign capital

dynamic poverty decomposition analysis an application to the philippines summary in this paper we propose a new method of poverty decomposition our method remedies the shortcomings of existing methods and has some desirable properties such as time reversion consistency and subperiod additivity our decomposition integrates the existing methods of growth redistribution decomposition and sector based decomposition because it allows us to decompose the change in poverty into growth and redistribution components for each group e g regions or sectors in the economy our decomposition works well in cases where only partial data are available for some periods it is also flexible and can be extended to have the following six components population shift within region redistribution between region redistribution nominal growth inflation and methodological change components the empirical application of the six way decomposition to the philippines for the period 1985 2009 shows that important policies for poverty reduction may differ across regions for example the autonomous region in muslim mindanao would need growth enhancing policies whereas eastern visayas would need policies to improve the income distribution our decomposition method has a wide applicability and may complement the poverty profile approach

imperfect factor mobility and the distribution of income abstract when labor is imperfectly mobile between industries workers may have a special interest in commercial policies that increase the price of the output of the industry in which they are employed this proposition is investigated in a two good model in which the degree of labor mobility is measured by the elasticity of a convex input transformation curve the existence of such a transformation curve is justified by a model in which individual workers have differing relative and absolute efficiencies in different industries the results are extended to the case of many industries

tariffs foreign capital and national welfare with sector specific factors abstract this paper examines the effect on national welfare of an endogenously determined inflow of foreign capital in the context of a well known model with sector specific inputs both for the case of unrestricted international trade and investment and in the presence of a tariff the second best problem of the optimal tax on foreign investment for a given tariff level is also investigated by application of the concept of shadow prices for primary factors in distorted open economies the results obtained are then related to analogous propositions derived previously for the standard heckscher ohlin model

an axiomatic characterization of the watts poverty index abstract although the first distribution sensitive decomposable poverty index the watts index has long been neglected by the profession even when it was searching for a decomposable index this neglect is due partly to the lack of an axiomatic characterization for the watts index this paper adopts an axiomatic approach and complements the watts index with such a characterization under a set of reasonable axioms the watts index is the unique index if a poverty index is perceived as the absolute amount of social welfare loss due to poverty the watts index is relatively easy to apply it also satisfies all basic axioms for a good poverty index

the welfare consequences of directly unproductive profit seeking dup lobbying activities price versus quantity distortions abstract this paper is a contribution to the growing literature on the theory of what bhagwati 1982 has christened the theory of dup activities these are activities that use up real resources in making profits i e income without producing directly or indirectly a good they result therefore in the contraction of the availability set defined on goods for one generic subset of such dup activities namely distortion triggered lobbying activities the paper establishes asymmetrical propositions on the possibility of such dup lobbying resulting in a paradoxical improvement of welfare

tariffs quotas and voluntary export restraints with and without internationally mobile capital this paper presents a general framework for comparing the effects of tariffs quotas and vers voluntary export restraints both with and without international capital mobility expressions for the shadow price of foreign exchange and the shadow price of capital under each type of trade restriction are derived and it is shown that although international capital mobility raises the welfare cost of tariff protection it lowers the welfare cost of quantitative restrictions in most cases the effects of exogenous shocks in the presence of quotas are intermediate between those in the presence of tariffs and those in the presence of vers tarifs douaniers contingentements et restrictions volontaires d l exportation quand le capital est ou n est pas mobile internationalement l auteur presente un cadre general d analyse qu il utilise pour comparer les effets de tarifs douaniers de contingentements et de restrictions volontaires a l exportation dans des contextes ofu le capital est ou n est pas mobile internationalement l auteur derive le prix fictif du change etranger et le prix fictif du capital sous l un et l autre types de restrictions au commerce et montre que meme si la mobilite internationale du capital augmente le cofut en terme de bien etre de la protection tarifaire elle reduit le cofut en terme de bien etre des restrictions sur les quantites echangees dans tous les cas les effets de chocs exogenes quand des contingentements existent sont toujours dans la fourchette entre ceux qu on observe quand des tarifs douaniers existent et ceux qui prevalent quand des restrictions volontaires i l exportation existent

global inequality when unequal countries create unequal people abstract current global inequality measures assume that national mean income does not matter to economic welfare at given household income as measured in surveys the paper questions that assumption on theoretical and empirical grounds and finds that prominent stylized facts about global inequality are not robust at one extreme theories of relative deprivation yield nationalistic measures whereby global inequality is average within country inequality which is rising however other theories and evidence point instead to the benefits of living in a richer country parameter values consistent with research on global subjective wellbeing imply higher inequality than prevailing measures though falling since 1990

wage inequality and poverty effects of lockdown and social distancing in europe social distancing and lockdown measures taken to contain the spread of covid 19 may have distributional economic costs beyond the contraction of gdp here we evaluate the capacity of individuals to work under a lockdown based on a lockdown working ability index which considers their teleworking capacity and whether their occupation is essential or closed our analysis reveals substantial and uneven potential wage losses across the distribution all around europe and we consistently find that both poverty and wage inequality rise in all european countries under four different scenarios 2 months of lockdown and 2 months of lockdown plus 6 months of partial functioning of closed occupations at 80 70 and 60 of full capacity we estimate for 29 european countries an average increase in the headcount poverty index that goes from 4 9 to 9 4 percentage points and a mean loss rate for poor workers between 10 and 16 2 the average increase in the gini coefficient ranges between 3 5 to 7 3 depending on the scenario considered decomposing overall wage inequality in europe we find that lockdown and social distance measures produce a double process of divergence both inequality within and between countries increase

labor market distortions the structure of protection and direct foreign investment abstract this paper analyzes the welfare effects of direct foreign investment in a general model that allows for labor market distortions trade in both intermediate inputs and final goods export subsidies and protection in the form of either tariffs or quotas it is shown that contrary to the conventional wisdom there is not in general any strong connection between the orientation of the trade regime sectoral capital intensity rankings and the desirability of attracting foreign investment

a note on tariff induced capital inflow and immiserization in the presence of taxation of foreign profits abstract this paper develops further the formal model of tariff induced capital inflow and immiserization presented by bhagwati 1973 we set down the necessary and sufficient condition under which immiserization will follow in addition it will be shown that the possibility of immiserization depends crucially on the initial amount of foreign capital as well as the rate of corporation tax on foreign capital

social preferences self interest and the demand for redistribution preferences for redistribution may be influenced by values and beliefs about distributive justice as well as by self interest people may prefer more redistribution to the poor if they believe that poverty is caused by circumstances beyond individual control therefore beliefs about the causes of income may affect demand for redistribution alternatively the effect of these beliefs on redistributive preferences may be spurious if they are correlated with income and self interest is not properly controlled for they may also measure incentive cost concerns using social survey data i find that self interest cannot explain the effect of these beliefs on redistributive preferences 2001 elsevier science b v all rights reserved

on the measurement of poverty official statistics in the united states and the united kingdom show a rise in poverty between the 1970 s and the 1980 s but scepticism has been expressed with regard to these findings in particular the methods employed in the measurement of poverty have been the subject of criticism this paper re examines three basic issues in measuring poverty the choice of the poverty line the index of poverty and the relation between poverty and inequality one general theme running through the paper is that there is a diversity of judgments which enter the measurement of poverty and that it is necessary to recognize these explicitly in the procedures adopted there is likely to be disagreement about the choice of poverty line affecting both its level and its structure in this situation we may only be able to make comparisons and not to measure differences and the comparisons may lead only to a partial rather than a complete ordering the first section of the paper discusses the stochastic dominance conditions which allow such comparisons illustrating their application by reference to data for the united states the choice of poverty measure has been the subject of an extensive literature and a variety of measures have been proposed in the second section of the paper a different approach is suggested considering a class of measures satisfying certain general properties and seeking conditions under which all members of the class which includes many of those proposed give the same ranking those sceptical about measures of poverty often assert that poverty and inequality are being confounded the third section of the paper distinguishes four different viewpoints and relates them to theories of justice and views of social welfare

poverty rankings using noisy data on living standards abstract a consistent and robust poverty ranking will be unaffected by the omission of random and identically distributed idiosyncratic determinants of individual welfare however ambiguities in ranking due to heterogeneity in error distributions are difficult to resolve on a priori grounds

global income distribution from the fall of the berlin wall to the great recession we present an improved panel database of national household surveys between 1988 and 2008 in 2008 the global gini index is around 70 5 having declined by approximately 2 gini points china graduated from the bottom ranks changing a twin peaked global income distribution to a single peaked one and creating an important global median class 90 of the fastest growing country deciles are from asia while almost 90 of the worst performers are from mature economies another winner was the global top 1 hence the global growth incidence curve has a distinct supine s shape with gains highest around the median and top

distortion triggered lobbying and welfare a contribution to the theory of directly unproductive profit seeking activities abstract the paper considers the normative implications of lobbying for non exclusive income generated by an exogenously specified policy intervention such lobbying activities are a subset of what bhagwati has termed directly unproductive profit seeking dup activities it is demonstrated that the welfare effects of lobbying triggered by a policy distortion depend critically on whether the direct impact of the policy constraint is on price or an quantity it is also shown that several standard comparative static welfare analyses of alternative policy distorted states are significantly affected once the policy intervention is assumed to be continuously accompanied by lobbying for the associated non exclusive income

inequality among world citizens 1820 1992 this paper investigates the distribution of well being among world citizens during the last two centuries the estimates show that inequality of world distribution of income worsened from the beginning of the 19th century to world war ii and after that seems to have stabilized or to have grown more slowly in the early 19th century most inequality was due to differences within countries later it was due to differences between countries inequality in longevity also increased during the 19th century but then was reversed in the second half of the 20th century perhaps mitigating the failure of income inequality to improve in the last decades jel d31 f0 n0 o0

defining poverty lines as a fraction of central tendency we show under lognormality that when the gini coefficient is stable over time defining the poverty line as a fraction of a central tendency of the living standard distribution restricts the evolution of the poverty measures to be stable that is poverty does not change if the gini coefficient does not change moreover when the gini coefficient slightly changes most of the poverty change can be considered a change in inequality then the consequences of using different poverty lines are analysed thus important features in studies of poverty change based on these lines may result from methodological choices rather than from economic mechanisms