robust international comparisons of distributions of disposable income and regional public goods the paper provides robust normative comparisons of 12 oecd countries based on their distributions of disposable income and access to two regional public goods infant mortality and pupil teacher ratios at public schools comparisons are performed using two and three dimensional dominance criteria that coincide with the unanimity of utilitarian judgments taken over specific classes of utility functions the criteria succeed in ranking conclusively about 30 of all possible comparisons in the two dimensional case compared with 67 for one dimensional income based comparisons and 6 for three dimensional ones introducing local public goods seems to worsen the relative standing of anglo saxon countries

a decomposition analysis of the trend in uk income inequality post war britain has experienced a number of dramatic demographic and social changes that have undoubtedly influenced the distribution of income there has been a rise in the number of pensioners whose incomes are relatively low a considerable increase in the number of young and old households living on their own and a remarkable expansion in the proportion of working wives the potential importance of these structural changes suggests that their impact on the income distribution needs to be examined systematically before any attempt can be made to interpret the observed trend in overall income inequality adequately the method usually adopted for this purpose attempts to create a comparable time series of distributions based on the structural characteristics pertaining in one particular year for example if we wished to investigate the effect of shifts in the age structure of the population this approach would disaggregate the distribution in one year tl and estimate what the distribution would have been like if the age structure had been the same as that observed in some other year to on the assumption that other distributional characteristics such as ageincome differentials and inequality within age groups remain invariant to this demographic change the comparison between the actual distribution at t1 and the constructed distribution at t1 with to s age structure is taken to indicate the impact of changes in the age structure over the period concerned this comparison can be presented in terms of quantile shares summary measures of inequality or the entire lorenz curves this approach known as shift share analysis or standardising the inequality series see semple i975 love and wolfson i976 dinwiddy and reed i977 royal commission i977 rowley and henderson i978 macleod and horner i980 is perfectly adequate for simple and straightforward structural changes when several changes are occurring simultaneously however it becomes difficult to identify the contribution of the individual factors and to assess their relative importance to the overall trend in inequality furthermore the combined impact of several structural influences will not in general sum up to the inequality change requiring explanation the purpose of this paper is to propose an alternative method of analysing

the structure of production technical change and productivity in a port the primary focus of this paper is the modelling and estimation of the structure of production technical change and total factor productivity tfp growth in a port special attention is given to the specification of technical change which is measured as the percent of containerization our findings indicate that technical change has been labour saving and capital using tfp has been growing from 1966 1983 at an annual average rate of 0 11 the main contribution to tfp growth has been containerization on the average 85 of the growth in tfp has been due to containerization and 15 of the growth has been due to economies of scale and output growth

international comparisons of welfare and poverty dominance orderings for ten countries inference based stochastic dominance procedures are applied to luxembourg income study data to rank ten western countries in terms of standards of living and poverty first order dominance comparisons ranks more than 50 percent of all pairwise comparisons and second order generalized lorenz dominance adds another 25 percent truncated dominance analysis is used to make inferences about poverty and up to 98 percent of the truncated distributions are ordered the results differ substantially from those obtained when only relative incomes and inequality are considered

when different market concentration indices agree abstract the herfindahl hirschman entropy and n firm indices may not agree when comparing market concentrations for different oligopoly markets the majorization pre ordering is shown to be both necessary and sufficient for all to agree

the impossibility of a progressive tax structure abstract when households are identical in all respects other than income a non decreasing average tax rate is both necessary and sufficient for post tax incomes to be always at least as equal as pre tax incomes this paper investigates whether this well known result can be extended to households with different needs a tax structure which never increases inequality in the lorenz sense is shown to be unable to discriminate between household types if in addition the tax structure never reduces the relative income of the poorest member of the neediest group of households then the same proportional tax must be applied to all households and redistribution is impossible either within or between groups of households with differing needs a similar conclusion is reached using conventional equivalence scale arguments and also applies when the parameters of the tax schedules are determined endogenously we discuss the significance of this impossibility result and its implications for tax design

from the copenhagen accord to efficient technology protocols abstract as the copenhagen conference of parties cop failed to negotiate a binding post kyoto agreement an alternative is proposed based on the copenhagen accord ca the ca as endorsed by cop16 in cancun aims to combat global warming with differentiated reduction targets of greenhouse gas emissions and by mobilizing resources supporting adaptation and carbon free technology in developing countries dcs using a special version of merge we study the global implications of the ca postulating extensions of the accord in the direction of technology transfer protocols ttps we assess scenarios needed to reach sustainable climate targets under such protocols it is shown that without binding commitments for dcs the warming target of 2 c will be exceeded with a probability above 50 even if annex b countries eliminate their emissions however moderate commitments of dcs when they reach sufficient economic development make the 2 c scenario feasible ttps combined with binding emission reduction targets thus provide a mechanism to reduce climate change damages and may generate significant secondary benefits for example the reduced tax subsidy scenario rts20 has 77 to 40 chances to remain below 2 c of warming and an undiscounted cumulative gross domestic product gdp cost of 0 75 relative to baseline not accounting for the benefits of avoided damages

some models for estimating technical and scale inefficiencies in data envelopment analysis in management contexts mathematical programming is usually used to evaluate a collection of possible alternative courses of action en route to selecting one which is best in this capacity mathematical programming serves as a planning aid to management data envelopment analysis reverses this role and employs mathematical programming to obtain ex post facto evaluations of the relative efficiency of management accomplishments however they may have been planned or executed mathematical programming is thereby extended for use as a tool for control and evaluation of past accomplishments as well as a tool to aid in planning future activities the ccr ratio form introduced by charnes cooper and rhodes as part of their data envelopment analysis approach comprehends both technical and scale inefficiencies via the optimal value of the ratio form as obtained directly from the data without requiring a priori specification of weights and or explicit delineation of assumed functional forms of relations between inputs and outputs a separation into technical and scale efficiencies is accomplished by the methods developed in this paper without altering the latter conditions for use of dea directly on observational data technical inefficiencies are identified with failures to achieve best possible output levels and or usage of excessive amounts of inputs methods for identifying and correcting the magnitudes of these inefficiencies as supplied in prior work are illustrated in the present paper a new separate variable is introduced which makes it possible to determine whether operations were conducted in regions of increasing constant or decreasing returns to scale in multiple input and multiple output situations the results are discussed and related not only to classical single output economics but also to more modern versions of economics which are identified with contestable market theories

rank dominance and international comparisons of income distributions abstract the rank dominance criterion for comparing income distributions assumes the pareto principle anonymity and population size invariance this paper applies rank dominance to compare international income distributions empirically rank dominance is a powerful tool for ordering income distributions our results suggest that much of the power of generalized lorenz dominance is due to efficiency preference and equity preference adds only marginally to the ability to order income distributions

openness and wage inequality in developing countries the latin american challenge to east asian conventional wisdom the experience of east asia in the 1960s and 1970s supports the theory that greater openness to trade tends to narrow the wage gap between skilled and unskilled workers in developing countries in latin america since the mid 1980s however increased openness has widened wage differentials this conflict of evidence is probably not the result of differences between east asia and latin america instead the conflict is probably the result of differences between the 1960s and the 1980s specifically the entry of china into the world market and perhaps the advent of new technology biased against unskilled workers

magnitude and direction of technological transfers for mitigating ghg emissions this paper discusses the issues of technological transfers aimed at reducing ghg mitigation costs under various assumptions in a new version of rice model we introduce technological transfer mechanism that donors monetary transfers go to recipients ghg mitigation through such transfer mechanism we examine the relationships between magnitude direction of transfers and choice of social welfare weights in the model our simulations show that different social welfare weights may lead to significant shifts on magnitudes even directions of technological transfers the results suggest that proposing policies of technological transfers should be mindful of distributional aspects and modeling assumptions

how well do static indicators identify the chronically poor abstract we investigate how well the most widely used static welfare indicators perform in identifying the chronically poor we propose a normative measure of performance the cost of a given impact on chronic poverty when transfers are contingent upon a purely static indicator using longitudinal household data from rural india we find that current consumption is not always a better indicator of chronic poverty than current income both however perform much better than other common indicators such as food share and access to land

how are investments allocated in a publicly owned port system political factors versus economic criteria castillo manzano j i and fageda x how are investments allocated in a publicly owned port system political factors versus economic criteria regional studies this paper estimates the determinants of investments in port infrastructure in the spanish regions made by the central administration it is found that the use of the infrastructure in relation to capacity has some influence on the amount of investment received by a region furthermore specialization in containers is also relevant for receiving more resources however it is found that when greater political decentralization does not go hand in hand with greater financial decentralization the importance of tactical political aspects increases overall efficiency plays a more relevant role in the regional allocation of investments in ports than in other transport infrastructures

tracking the stepwise effects of regulatory reforms over time a back door approach most of the literature on the efficiency effects of regulatory reforms ignores the gradual nature of the implementation of these reforms this article describes a new simple data manipulation that minimizes data requirements to measure econometrically the impact on efficiency of each stage of multi stages regulatory reforms the approach can easily be implemented using standard stochastic frontier software programs it is illustrated with data on the spanish port system which went through a two stage reform during the 1990s

the impact of food stamps on us poverty in the 1980s a marginal dominance analysis the relative effectiveness of the us food stamp program in reducing the incidence and depth of poverty is compared at a number of poverty lines across time the analysis is based upon an extension of dominance methods for ordering poverty recently developed statistical inference procedures and a merged data set that permnits an unusually comprehensive measure of income the comparative effectiveness of the food stamp program in reducing headcount poverty over time is contingent on the poverty line selected however the reduction in poverty gaps is greater in 1990 than in 1982 regardless of the poverty line chosen the sensitivity of the results to the income concept equivalence scale and time period used for measuring income are also considered

does less inequality among households mean less inequality among individuals abstract consider an income distribution among households of the same size in which individuals equally needy from the point of view of an ethical observer are treated unfairly individuals are split into two types those who receive more than one half of the family budget and those who receive less than one half we look for conditions under which welfare and inequality quasi orders established at the household level still hold at the individual one a necessary and sufficient condition for the generalized lorenz test is that the income of dominated individuals is a concave function of the household income individuals of poor households have to stand more together than individuals of rich households this property also proves to be crucial for the preservation of the relative and absolute lorenz criteria when the more egalitarian distribution is the poorest extensions to individuals heterogeneous in needs and more than two types are also provided

equivalence scale relativities and the extent of inequality and poverty most inequality and poverty theory analyzes equivalent income distributions for homogeneous populations incomes are assumed to be deflated by an equivalence scale that accounts for differences in needs between households yet in practice there is no consensus about what the appropriate equivalence scale is the authors analyze how the choice of equivalence scale affects inequality and poverty measures and show that there is a systematic relationship between equivalence scale generosity and the extent of inequality and poverty they consider most of the measures in common use and provide some empirical illustrations copyright 1992 by royal economic society

the measurement of inequality and poverty a policy maker s guide to the literature abstract mathematical measures of poverty and inequality embody values that reflect the historical political social intellectual and ethical forces prevalent at the time of their formulation so that policy makers may select measures of poverty and inequality that are consistent with their values it is important to make explicit the value judgements implicit in the measures models designed to measure poverty and inequality fall into four categories absolute poverty measures absolute income measures relative poverty measures and relative inequality measures this article examines the principal models within each category and discusses the assumptions limitations and values implicit in the models

testing for marginal changes in income distributions with lorenz and concentration curves asymptotically distribution free statistical tests for comparing absolute and relative lorenz and concentration curves are provided the procedures do not require independent samples and can be used to test for marginal changes in income distributions the tests are illustrated using a large sample of tax returns that have been randomly selected for audit by the internal revenue service the tests reveal the marginal effects of systematic underreporting of income and tax liabilities on the u s income distribution copyright 1994 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

some classes of functions that preserve the inequality and welfare orderings of income distributions abstract we identify in the paper those classes of functions that preserve the ranking of distributions according to three welfare criteria introduced recently by a f shorrocks economica 50 1983 3 17 we prove that a necessary and sufficient condition for a function to preserve the generalized lorenz ordering of distributions is that it be increasing and concave requiring welfare improvements to be compatible with more equality we obtain linear resp affine functions when emphasis is placed on relative resp absolute income differentials

capturing preferences for inequality aversion in decision support abstract we investigate the situation where there is interest in ranking distributions of income of wealth of health of service levels across a population in which individuals are considered preferentially indistinguishable and where there is some limited information about social preferences we use a natural dominance relation generalised lorenz dominance used in welfare comparisons in economic theory in some settings there may be additional information about preferences for example if there is policy statement that one distribution is preferred to another and any dominance relation should respect such preferences however characterising this sort of conditional dominance relation specifically dominance with respect to the set of all symmetric increasing quasiconcave functions in line with given preference information turns out to be computationally challenging this challenge comes about because through the assumption of symmetry any one preference statement i prefer giving 100 to jane and 110 to john over giving 150 to jane and 90 to john implies a large number of other preference statements i prefer giving 110 to jane and 100 to john over giving 150 to jane and 90 to john i prefer giving 100 to jane and 110 to john over giving 90 to jane and 150 to john we present theoretical results that help deal with these challenges and present tractable linear programming formulations for testing whether dominance holds between any given pair of distributions we also propose an interactive decision support procedure for ranking a given set of distributions and demonstrate its performance through computational testing

ethically robust comparisons of bidimensional distributions with an ordinal attribute abstract we provide foundations for robust normative evaluation of distributions of two attributes one of which is cardinally measurable and transferable between individuals and the other is ordinal and non transferable the result that we establish takes the form of an analogue to the standard hardy littlewood polya theorem for distributions of one cardinal attribute more specifically we identify the transformations of the distributions which guarantee that social welfare increases according to utilitarian unanimity provided that the utility function is concave in the cardinal attribute and that its marginal utility with respect to the same attribute is non increasing in the ordinal attribute we establish that this unanimity ranking of the distributions is equivalent to the ordered poverty gap quasi ordering introduced by bourguignon 12 finally we show that if one distribution dominates another according to the ordered poverty gap criterion then the former can be derived from the latter by means of an appropriate and finite sequence of such transformations

ranking income distributions a large variety of policy questions involve choices between social states and a consequent ordering of the feasible alternatives when these social states are related to the levels of welfare experienced by individuals or households two central issues stand out in determining the relative desirability of different social outcomes one of these is the essentially positive exercise of achieving comparability between households with different characteristics such as composition or preferences operating in different environments for example facing different price structures the other concerns the normative judgments implicit in the evaluation of alternative allocations of resourcesthe emphasis placed on inequality between households and the extent to which greater inequality can be compensated by higher average living standards this paper focuses on the second of these issues and in doing so we abstract from the problem of household comparability by considering a population of n households identical in all respects except for their incomes the question of ordering social states then becomes one of ranking income distributions over a group of anonymous households or individuals borrowing the usual assumptions imposed on consumer preferences we may suppose that a social ordering of income distributions can be represented by a welfare function 2

the design of direct taxation and family benefits abstract the subject of this paper is the design of the personal income tax and social security benefits that vary with the size of the family it is concerned with the analytical problems of policy design that arise from constraints on the instruments which may be used from differences in social judgements about the desirability of redistribution and from differences of view about the disincentive effects of taxation the paper considers these issues in the context of the french tax benefit system and the implications of the french system being harmonised towards certain features of the british system

systematic departures from the frontier a framework for the analysis of firm inefficiency departures from a production or cost frontier may reflect the systematic effect of conditions that contribute to inefficiency to test whether some portion of frontier function departures can be systematically explained the frontier inefficiency error component is modeled as a function of various causal factors and a random component the functional form of the inefficiency error term model is chosen to assure strict one sidedness preliminary empirical results generated from electric utility data suggest the superiority of including both systematic and random components in the inefficiency error term

evaluating the operational efficiency of major ports in the asia pacific region using data envelopment analysis in recent years as competition among international ports has intensified the impartial and objective evaluation of port operational efficiency has become increasingly important in enabling each individual port to understand its peculiar strengths and weaknesses as well as any immediate threats or opportunities that may affect its competitive environment this study applies ccr model bcc model and 3 stage dea model to evaluate the changes in efficiency that have taken place between 1998 and 2001 in 10 ports in the asia pacific region using cross period data the empirical results show that different model will lead to different result on average the efficiency estimated by 3 stage dea procedure is the highest while ccr efficiency is the lowest it should be noted that the efficiencies based on ccr and bcc model are somewhat lower than the 3 stage dea approaches because they do not take the environmental factors managerial inefficiency and statistical noises into account

the absence of deprivation as a measure of social well being an empirical investigation abstract the generalised lorenz criterion is widely used for making welfare comparisons within and across countries on the basis of their income distributions experimental studies have challenged this way of proceeding by showing that the principle of transfers which underlies the generalised lorenz criterion does not meet with widespread agreement among the public that theorists would have expected we propose to substitute the non deprivation quasi ordering introduced by chakravarty 1997 for the generalised lorenz criterion this criterion is less demanding than the generalised lorenz criterion as it builds on a weaker version of the principle of transfers and it is therefore more likely to be accepted by the public we use income data from the luxembourg income study for 17 countries in order to contrast the generalised lorenz and the non deprivation criteria although the non deprivation quasi ordering is less decisive than the generalised lorenz criterion it is shown that the former approximates the latter surprisingly well

efficiency gains from port reform and the potential for yardstick competition lessons from mexico abstract this paper shows how measures of relative efficiency performance could promote yardstick competition between port infrastructure operators the illustration is based on a study of the efficiency effects of the mexican 1993 port reform it covers 1996 99 and relies on a stochastic production frontier to show that mexico s ports achieved 2 8 3 3 average annual efficiency gains since reform the port specific measures point to consistent leaders and laggards which would not all be identified by common partial productivity indicators this information could be built into an explicit incentive based regulatory regime aiming at promoting catch up by laggards

a new data set measuring income inequality this article presents a new data set on inequality in the distribution of income the authors explain the criteria they applied in selecting data on gini coefficients and on individual quintile groups income shares comparison of the new data set with existing compilations reveals that the data assembled here represent an improvement in quality and a significant expansion in coverage although differences in the definition of the underlying data might still affect inter temporal and international comparability based on this new data set the authors do not find a systematic link between growth and changes in aggregate inequality they do find a strong positive relationship between growth and reduction of poverty

low carbon society scenario analysis of transport sector of an emerging economy the aim enduse modelling approach abstract the transport sector of a country is the backbone driving the economy forward thailand s land transport sector is modelled using the aim enduse which is a recursive dynamic optimization model based on bottom up modelling principle the travel demand is divided into two major categories which are passenger travel and freight travel the objective of this paper is to analyse the mitigation possible through low carbon society lcs measures and emission tax et two scenario clusters are devised along with the bau case the lcs scenario cluster has three designed scenarios which are lcs l lcs m and lcs h the emission tax et cluster has four scenarios where the taxes of 50 100 200 and 500 usd t co2 are implemented along with this the marginal abatement costs mac of the counter measures cms and the co benefits in terms of energy security productivity and air pollutant mitigation are also assessed results show that lcs scenarios are possible of mitigating up to 1230 mt co2 cumulatively from 2010 to 2050 in terms of macs new vehicles play a pivotal role along with hybrid vehicles the average abatement cost aac assessment shows that the aac of lcs h scenario is in the order of 100 usd t co2 all the lcs and et scenarios show an enhancement in energy security and also a threefold increase in productivity there is distinct mitigation in terms of air pollutants from the transport sector as well

measuring segregation of the poor evidence from india summary compared to the extensive literature on measurement of poverty the question of how the poor are distributed regionally has received less attention this paper fills the gap in the literature by providing a conceptual framework to measure inequality in the distribution of the poor a poverty segregation curve is used to compare a region s share of the poor population with its share in the overall population a unique contribution of the paper is formulating a generalized version of the poverty segregation curve unlike the segregation curve the generalized segregation curve also takes average poverty rates into account while ranking distributions thus the generalized segregation curve may rank a distribution with substantially lower poverty rates above a distribution with higher poverty rates when differences between their segregation curves are relatively small the segregation curves are used to analyze changes in the distribution of the poor in india since the economic reforms in the early 1990s poverty rates and shares among all states territories and districts in india are estimated using data from the national sample survey organization in 1994 2004 and 2010 in the decades following the reforms india witnessed high growth rates and declining poverty rates despite the reduction in poverty our analysis is the first to reveal that there was a significant rise in segregation of the poor over time some states had disproportionately high share of the poor compared to their share in the total population within states the extent of segregation was lower among some of the poorest states and higher in less poor states the generalized segregation curves show that the substantial decline in poverty rates since the reforms was not adequate to compensate the rise in segregation of the poor increase in segregation was also evident when the poor are identified as those who lacked education health and access to basic services reducing the segregation of the poor is important if india is to attain regionally balanced economic growth

testing the significance of income distribution changes over the 1980s business cycle a cross national comparison using kernel density estimation we describe the distribution of household size adjusted real income and how it changed over the business cycle of the 1980s in the united states and the united kingdom we confirm previous studies that show income inequality increased in the two countries and the middle of the distribution was squashed down using a series of statistical tests however we find that while the mass in both tails of the distribution increased significantly in both countries over the period by far the greatest gains were in the upper tail copyright 1999 john wiley sons ltd

dollars and dreams a reduced middle class alternative explanations we decompose annual earnings into hours of work and hourly earnings and analyze male female differences in earnings inequality using canadian data our results indicate that the larger female inequality in earnings is due to a greater inequality in the

on the rank generalized lorenz and overtaking criteria for evaluating stochastic income regimes this essay is concerned with the evaluation of income regimes that is a set of income classes and the stochastic process which governs the individual s position among the income classes we follow champernowne 4 theil 21 shorrocks 18 19 bartholomew 2 geweke marshall and zarkin 9 and conlisk 5 in characterizing mobility as a markov chain here states of a markov chain correspond to positions in the income classes utilizing the ergodic theorem for markov chains and propositions from the theory of decisionmaking under uncertainty we derive necessary and sufficient conditions on the income classes for one such income regime to be preferred to another in terms of the overtaking criterion specifically we show that the rank dominance condition saposnik 17 is necessary and sufficient for there to be a critical time at which overtaking occurs for each agent this time depends on the agent s von neumann morgenstern utility function which is merely required to be monotone increasing in income moreover versions of the generalized lorenz criterion shorrocks 20 provide necessary and sufficient conditions for there to be a time at which uniform overtaking occurs this time being the same for all agents provided the agents are risk averse among the applications of this model to individual choice one may consider a new college graduate deciding among employment opportunities in addition to starting salaries an applicant should consider the firms entire salary schedules as well as prospects for promotion within each firm alternatively one may consider a musician who must choose between a back section position with a leading orchestra or a more prominent position with a less highly regarded orchestra again one may be wise to consider the entire compensation schedule as well as the prospects for

income distribution factor endowments and trade openness abstract this paper studies the empirical links among factor endowments trade and personal income distribution by using panel data we show that land and capital intensive countries have a less equal income distribution while skill intensive countries have a more equal income distribution we also show that the effects of trade openness on inequality depend on factor endowments in a way consistent with several recent case studies but not with the simple hecksher ohlin framework our results are robust to the division of the sample according to level of income the inclusion of different regressors the use of different measures of trade openness and of relative factor abundance and tests for possible problems of endogeneity

true world income distribution 1988 and 1993 first calculation based on household surveys alone the paper derives world income or expenditure distribution of individuals for two years 1988 and 1993 it is the first paper to calculate world distribution for individuals based entirely on household survey data from 91 countries and adjusted for differences in purchasing power parity between the countries measured by the gini index inequality increased from an already very high 63 in 1988 to 66 in 1993 the increase was driven more by rising differences in mean incomes between the countries than by rising inequalities within countries the most important contributors were rising urban rural differences in china and slow growth of rural incomes in south asia compared to several large developed market economies

aversion to health inequalities in healthcare prioritisation a multicriteria optimisation perspective abstract in this paper we discuss the prioritisation of healthcare projects where there is a concern about health inequalities but the decision maker is reluctant to make explicit quantitative value judgements and the data systems only allow the measurement of health at an aggregate level our analysis begins with a standard welfare economic model of healthcare resource allocation we show how under the assumption that the healthcare projects under consideration have a small impact on individual health the problem can be reformulated as one of finding a particular subset of the class of efficient solutions to an implied multicriteria optimisation problem algorithms for finding such solutions are readily available and we demonstrate our approach through a worked example of treatment for clinical depression

relative undernutrition in puerto rico under alternative food assistance programmes in the early 1980s puerto rico experienced a conversion from the food stamp program fsp to the nutrition assistance program nap and a severe recession to compare relative undernutrition in puerto rico in 1977 and 1984 stochastic dominance methods and statistical inference procedures are applied to nutrient distributions to separate the effect of the recession from the effect of converting food coupons to cash benefits a multiple regression model of nutrient consumption is also estimated in the dominance comparisons every improvement in nutrition status between 1977 and 1984 is statistically significant at the lowest quintile while no case of worsening undernutrition is significant at the lowest quintile the multiple regression model provides some evidence that the conversion from food coupons to cash might have reduced nutrition status in the lowest quintile but a larger proportion of food assistance was allocated to low income households under the nap than under the fsp no evidence of signi

multidimensional welfare distributions empirical application to household panel data from vietnam this article explores the empirical application of theoretical multidimensional welfare distribution analysis techniques to real household welfare distributions the article operationalizes recent conceptual developments in multidimensional distribution theory and assesses their usefulness for the measurement of multidimensional household inequality the results strongly highlight the importance of bringing nonmonetary aspects of household welfare into the forefront of inequality analysis agreement over the various approaches to the measurement of multidimensional inequality entails however nontrivial decisions that may limit the practical usefulness of these measures we suggest that the use of multidimensional inequality ranges and the application of restrictive dominance criteria to multidimensional welfare distributions may open significant scope for further developments in the empirical analysis of multidimensional inequality

lorenz dominance and welfare changes in the u s distribution of income 1967 1986 this paper examines income inequality in the untied states over the period 1967 86 using recently developed tests for differences in lorenz curves the authors are able to rank eighteen of nineteen annual comparisons in contrast standard techniques are able to rank only twelve these results suggest that the lorenz dominance principle is more empirically relevant than previously thought the tests reveal a sharp rise in u s inequality between 1978 and 1982 as well as a shift toward greater inequality over the entire period the authors also examine changes in economic welfare using the joint mean lorenz dominance principle copyright 1991 by mit press

a generalized production frontier approach for estimating determinants of inefficiency in u s dairy farms this article investigates farm level efficiency of u s dairy farmers by estimating their technical and allocative efficiency technical inefficiency is assumed to be composed of a deterministic component that is a function of some farm specific characteristics and a random component by doing this we extend the stochastic frontier methodology in which determinants of technicial inefficiency are explicitly introduced in the model given the inputs variations in efficiency of farms are then explained by both deterministic and random components of technical inefficiency the empirical results indicate that a levels of education of the farmer are important factors determining technical inefficiency and b large farms are more efficient technically than small and medium sized farms both technical and allocative inefficiency are found to decrease with increase in the level of education of the farmer

inequality and welfare in market economies abstract atkinson 1970 and kolm 1969 have shown how lorenz ranking of distributions of a fixed amount of income or a single commodity may correspond to social welfare rankings lower inequality indicates higher social welfare atkinson and bourguignon 1982 and kolm 1977 offer two ways of extending this result to multi commodity environments we investigate an alternative approach based on the existence of markets and market prices at which agents maximize utility our main result offers a welfare based method of making real national income comparisons which takes into account the distribution of individual welfare

statistical inference for the measurement of the incidence of taxes and transfers we establish the asymptotic sampling distribution of general functions of quantile based estimators computed from samples that are not necessarily independent the results provide the statistical framework within which to assess the progressivity of taxes and benefits their horizontal inequity and the change in the inequality of income which they cause by the same token these findings characterise the sampling distribution of a number of popular indices of progressivity horizontal inequity and redistribution they can also be used to assess welfare and inequality changes using panel data and to assess poverty when it depends on estimated population quantiles we illustrate these results using micro data on the incidence of taxes and benefits in canada

sharing the cost of a public good an incentive constrained axiomatic approach we study the problem of provision and cost sharing of a public good in large economies where exclusion complete or partial is possible we search for incentive constrained efficient allocation rules that display fairness properties population monotonicity says that an increase in population should not be detrimental to anyone demand monotonicity states that an increase in the demand for the public good in the sense of a first order stochastic dominance shift in the distribution of preferences should not be detrimental to any agent whose preferences remain unchanged under suitable domain restrictions we give an explicit characterization of all incentive constrained efficient allocation rules we then show that there exists a unique incentive constrained efficient and demand monotonic allocation rule the so called serial rule in the binary public good case the serial rule is also the only incentive constrained efficient and population monotonic rule

calculation and decomposition of income inequality in low and middle income countries a survey data analysis this article estimates income inequality in a sample of four low and middle income lmi countries namely albania nepal tajikistan and tanzania using the household survey data nepal living st

the measurement and trend of housing inequality in the united states 1978 85 inequality in housing services for renters owners and all households in the united states is estimated for 1978 and 1985 hedonic techniques are applied to data from the american housing survey to derive values for housing services that include publicly provided as well as subsidized housing we find significant disparities in housing but substantially less inequality than in incomes in 1978 the top decile garnered 19 2 of housing services while the bottom decile received only 5 1 the trend however is towards greater equality in housing with large and statistically significant shifts across all deciles by 1985 the share of the top decile dropped to 16 3 a percentage decrease in share of 15 3 while that of the bottom decile rose to 5 7 a percentage increase of 11 4

the impact of learning by doing on the timing and costs of co2 abatement abstract a particular ceiling on atmospheric co 2 concentrations can be maintained through a variety of emission pathways over the past decade there has been considerable debate over the characteristics of a least cost pathway some have suggested that a gradual departure from the emissions baseline will be the most cost effective because it reduces the pressure for premature retirement of the existing capital stock and it provides valuable time to develop low cost low carbon emitting substitutes others counter that a major flaw in analyses that support this line of reasoning is that they ignore learning by doing lbd in this paper we examine the impact of lbd on the timing and costs of emissions abatement with regard to timing we find that including learning by doing does not significantly alter the conclusions of previous studies that treated technology cost as exogenous the analysis supports the earlier conclusion that for a wide range of stabilization ceilings a gradual transition away from the no policy emissions baseline is preferable to one that requires substantial near term reductions we find that the major impact of including learning by doing is on the costs of emission abatement depending upon the sensitivity of costs to cumulative experience lbd can substantially reduce the overall costs of emissions abatement

firm and time varying technical and allocative efficiency an application to port cargo handling firms abstract in this paper we present an econometric model to calculate both the technical and the allocative efficiency in cargo handling firms in the port of las palmas spain to achieve these aims we estimate a system of equations consisting of a translog input distance function and cost shares equations using this procedure we can check the hypothesis in which given technology and prices terminal port inputs are not optimally allocated in the sense that costs are not minimized the main contribution of this paper is to apply an empirical model that allows the unbiased estimation of allocative inefficiency of input use in two ways an error components approach and a parametric approach we also avoid the greene problem and allow allocative inefficiency to be systematic both size and traffic mix are first shown to be sufficiently diverse as to allow for a reliable estimation of a representative flexible translog function

declining inequality in schooling in brazil and its effects on inequality in earnings abstract household survey data demonstrate that brazilian males born between 1925 and 1963 experienced steady increases in mean schooling and significant declines in schooling inequality the variance in years of schooling increased for cohorts born up until 1950 with steady declines for more recent cohorts decomposition of a standard human capital earnings equation indicates that trends in schooling tended to reduce earnings inequality from 1976 to 1985 due to reductions in both the variance of schooling and in returns to schooling these improvements were more than offset however by increases in other sources of inequality although the net increase in earnings inequality from 1976 to 1985 is disturbing the reduction in schooling inequality represents a fundamental improvement in the determinants of earnings inequality in brazil that will have beneficial effects for decades

nutrition and nonparticipation in the us food stamp programme microdata from the national food consumption survey are used to test for differences in caloric and protein intake distributions we compare poor households that participate in the us food stamp programme to eligible households that do not participate tests for stochastic dominance provide unambiguous evidence that eligible nonparticipants suffer from relative undernutrition compared to participating households probit analysis is used to identify characteristics of participating and nonparticipating households

climate change scenarios and technology transfer protocols abstract we apply a specific version of merge etl an integrated assessment model to study global climate policies supported by technology transfer protocols ttps we model a specific formulation of such a ttp where donor countries finance via carbon tax revenues the diffusion of carbon free technologies in developing countries dcs and quantify its benefits industrialized countries profit from increased technology exports global diffusion of advanced technology leading to additional technology learning and cost reductions and reduced climate damages through the likelihood of greater global participation in a new international agreement dcs experience increased welfare from access to subsidized technology and profit from the reduction of damages related to climate change and expected secondary benefits of carbon abatement such as reduced local and regional air pollution the analysis identifies potential candidate technologies that could be supported under a ttp and the impact of a ttp on economic development including the flow of transfer subsidies and global emissions although a ttp may encourage additional participation such a proposal is only likely to be successful if an increased willingness to pay to avoid climate damages is accepted first by the present and future generations of the industrialized world and later on when sufficient economic growth is accumulated by today s developing countries

calm after the storms after rising during most but not all ofthe 1960 85 period inequality in chile seems to have stabilized since around 1987 following the stormy period of economic and political reforms of the 197

income distribution in the dynamic two factor trade model the issue of the effects of trade on personal income distribution has remained largely unexamined this paper describes an overlapping generations 2 x 2 model with a bequest motive and heterogeneous agents in order to examine the problem in this dynamic setting trade leads to both short run and long run reductions increases in inequality in labor capital abundant countries if the investment good is capital intensive if the consumption good is capital intensive the short run effects continue to hold but the long run effects are ambiguous copyright 1992 by the london school of economics and political science

household inequality social welfare and trade abstract working with sen social welfare functions meaning explicit separability between mean income and income dispersion we develop a generalized dual approach to tracking household inequality aspects of social welfare in general equilibrium we highlight how household equity can be examined analytically alongside production efficiency in duality based models using our dual framework to explore potential trade offs between efficiency and equity effects of trade policy our results complement the set of standard inequality results in trade theory focused on functional rather than household inequality we also find that the relative distributional impact of tariffs on welfare is conditional on the initial level of inequality

cost function estimates scale economies and technological progress in the turkish electricity generation sector abstract turkish electricity sector has undergone significant institutional changes since 1984 the recent developments since 2001 including the setting up of a regulatory agency to undertake the regulation of the sector and increasing participation of private investors in the field of electricity generation are of special interest this paper estimates cost functions and investigates the degree of scale economies overinvestment and technological progress in the turkish electricity generation sector for the period 1984 2006 using long run and short run translog cost functions estimations were done for six groups of firms public and private the results indicate existence of scale economies throughout the period of analysis hence declining long run average costs the paper finds empirical support for the averch johnson effect until 2001 i e firms overinvested in an environment where there are excess returns to capital but this effect was reduced largely after 2002 technological progress deteriorated slightly from 1984 1993 to 1994 2001 but improved after 2002 overall the paper found that regulation of the market under the newly established regulating agency after 2002 was effective and there are potential gains from such regulation

marginal conditional stochastic dominance this paper introduces the concept of marginal conditional stochastic dominance mcsd which states the conditions under which all risk averse individuals when presented with a given portfolio prefer to increase the share of one risky asset over that of another mcsd rules also answer the question of whether all risk averse individuals include a new asset in their portfolio when assets returns are correlated mcsd criteria are expressed in terms of the probability distributions of the assets and of the underlying portfolio an empirical application of mcsd is provided using stocks traded on the new york stock exchange mcsd rules are used to show that in the long run one cannot assert that the market portfolio is inefficient

nontaxable income and necessary consumption the rousseau s paradox of fiscal egalitarianism this article compares a tax method featuring flat rates and fixed allowances equal for all taxpayers surplus income tax method sitm procedure with a tax method featuring also flat rates and increasing personal allowances ipas to meet the amounts of necessary consumption required by the different living standards discretionary income tax method ditm procedure our results show that the ditm procedure generates an after tax income distribution less unequal and superior in terms of social welfare moreover the assumption for comparison purposes of identical total tax revenues leads to the corollary that the flat tax rate under the ditm is necessarily larger than the one under the sitm being thus the former taxmethod is more progressive than the latter these results imply an obvious paradox considering the commonly accepted principle that basic necessities are the same for everyone rousseau 1755 based on the results obtained in this article we have labelled this paradox as the rousseau s

income inequality income composition and macroeconomic trends israel 1979 93 the paper offers several explanations for income inequality trends in israel during 1979 93 two types of analysis are employed decomposition of the gini coefficient by income source and population sub group and time series regression on macroeconomic variables it is found that the slight increase in inequality over the period is a result of opposing forces and that the major difference between the inflation 1979 84 and stabilization 1985 93 periods is in the inequality reducing effect of direct taxes increasing in the first period while declining in the second unemployment had a regressive impact whereas inflation acted as a progressive tax in the first period but not in the second