inequality and mobility of household incomes in europe evidence from the echp in this article we want to shed light on two aspects of income mobility relative total income mobility using the estimator by fields and ok 1999 and equalization of long run incomes measured by the index of fields 2009 the cross country comparison shows a negative relationship between total relative mobility and long run income equalization this result is contrary to the intuition given by shorrocks 1978a who stated that higher relative mobility will cause higher equalization of incomes when the accounting period is extended

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

marketing mix and brand sales in global markets examining the contingent role of country market characteristics marketing products globally is challenging due to the diverse nature of markets we use market heterogeneity unbranded competition resource and infrastructure availability and sociopolitical governance as country market characteristics that distinguish between developed and emerging countries we investigate their moderating role on the relationship between elements of the marketing mix and brand sales we provide evidence from a hierarchical linear model and a panel data set of brands from 14 emerging and developed markets that account for 62 of the global gdp that country market characteristics moderate the relationship between the complete set of marketing mix elements and brand sales performance asymmetrically while distribution and price have the largest impact in emerging and developed countries respectively product innovation and advertising have significantly larger impacts in emerging markets relative to developed countries these finding highlights the importance of contingency view of marketing strategy in global markets

international inequality in the basic needs indicators abstract using data for nearly 100 countries cross country inequality indexes for five major basic needs indicators are computed and compared with income inequality indexes except for physician supply inter country inequality in meeting basic needs appears much smaller than income inequality while inter country income disparity increased inequality in basic needs indicators declined during 1960 1978

the computation of world income distribution there is a growing perception of the international economy as an interdependent system the un general assembly s 1974 75 declaration on principles and programs for a change in the international economic order assumes that the welfare of peasants workers businessmen civil servants and political elites in less developed countries ldcs are linked to decisions made by economic policymakers in the industrialized nations many people in ldcs especially elites compare their material levels of living with those of rich countries accordingly there is merit to examining global income distribution because scholars do not have a good technique for aggregating country income distributions into a world income distribution they rarely analyze this distribution this article presents a method of calculating global distribution given a set of national distributions as a sidelight to their work on purchasing power parity kravis heston and summers calculate world 145 nonsocialist countries income distribution but by nations not by households or individuals they assume that each individual receives his gnp per capita table 1

intragenerational income mobility in latin america economic mobility has not been widely studied in developing countries until very recently owing to the lack of suitable data studying mobility requires longitudinal data tracking economic units that is individuals households or firms over time collecting this type of data is expensive and historically few latin american countries carried it out now however such data sets are available for a number of latin american and caribbean countries table a 1 in the appendix provides a list of available panel data sets that can be used for income mobility studies for these countries in this paper we discuss how the knowledge gleaned from mobility studies differs from comparable cross sectional analysis the structure of the paper is as follows the next section discusses what mobility is how it can be measured and how it differs from inequality the subsequent section reviews previous mobility studies in latin american countries the paper then summarizes the contributions of our own recent work and the final section discusses what lies ahead in mobility research for latin american economies

the role of real income level and income distribution in fulfillment of basic needs abstract using internationally comparable estimates of real gdp per capita along with world bank data on seven basic needs indicators and one income equality measure relative importance of real income level and income equality for improvement in the provision of basic needs is assessed on the basis of a multiple regression model income level seems important in almost all cases but the importance of income equality is observed only on a limited scale although income is probably more important in low income ldcs the relationships studied appear broadly similar in the low income and the middle income ldc contexts

assessing individual income growth we develop methods for describing distributions of income growth across individuals and for comparing changes in growth distributions over time the methods include graphical devices income growth profiles and dominance conditions and also summary indices together with associated methods of estimation and inference taking an explicitly longitudinal perspective our approach illuminates clearly who are the gainers and the losers and also provides distributionally sensitive assessments ones that allow the income growth for different individuals to be weighted differently our empirical application shows that the pattern of income growth in britain over the period 1992 1996 was less pro poor than that for 1998 2002 and not significantly different from the pattern for 2001 2005

educational inequality and intergenerational mobility in latin america a new database abstract the causes and consequences of the intergenerational persistence of inequality are a topic of great interest among various fields in economics however until now issues of data availability have restricted a broader and cross national perspective on the topic based on rich sets of harmonized household survey data we contribute to filling this gap by computing time series for several indexes of relative and absolute intergenerational education mobility for 18 latin american countries over 50 years and making them publicly available we find that intergenerational mobility is on average rising in latin america this pattern seems to be driven by the high upward mobility of children from low educated families at the same time there is substantial immobility at the top of the distribution significant cross country differences are observed and are associated with income inequality poverty economic growth public educational expenditures and assortative mating

sales growth of new pharmaceuticals across the globe the role of regulatory regimes prior marketing literature has overlooked the role of regulatory regimes in explaining international sales growth of new products this paper addresses this gap in the context of new pharmaceuticals 15 new molecules in 34 countries and sheds light on the effects of regulatory regimes on new drug sales across the globe based on a time varying coefficient model we find that differences in regulation substantially contribute to cross country variation in sales one of the regulatory constraints investigated i e manufacturer price controls has a positive effect on drug sales the other forms of regulation such as restrictions of physician prescription budgets and the prohibition of direct to consumer advertising dtca tend to hurt sales the effect of manufacturer price controls is similar for newly launched and mature drugs by contrast regulations on physician prescription budgets and dtca have a differential effect for newly launched and mature drugs whereas the former hurts mature drugs more the latter has a larger effect on newly launched drugs in addition to these regulatory effects we find that national culture economic wealth and lagged sales also affect drug sales our findings may be used as input by managers for international launch and marketing decisions they may also be used by public policy administrators to assess the role of regulatory regimes in pharmaceutical sales growth

reordering inequality and divergent growth processes of neighbourhood change in dutch cities neighbourhood socioeconomic change is often related to structural processes that transform urban income compositions in the netherlands restructuring of the welfare state and the housing market a

a multinational examination of the symbolic instrumental framework of consumer brand identification the authors propose a symbolic instrumental interactive framework of consumer brand identification cbi and explore its predictiveness across 15 countries using multinational data they show that the negative impact of the misalignment between self brand congruity and perceived quality on cbi is universal the interaction among cbi perceived quality and uncertainty avoidance orientation in motivating consumers identity sustaining behavior is weak however the synergy between cbi and perceived quality in motivating consumers identity promoting behavior is stronger among collectivist consumers the authors derive a typology of symbolic instrumental misalignments to help international marketing managers motivate consumers to identify with and promote brands

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

country of origin effects for uni national and bi national products this study examines the effects of country of origin and brand name cues on consumer evaluations of uni national and bi national products and estimates the perceived values of such cues from personal interviews with a regional quota sample of household residents the study found the salience of country of origin in product evaluations under within subject experimental design finally managerial implications are discussed in regards to international branding and sourcing strategies

brand popularity country image and market share an empirical study this study examines how brand popularity in conjunction with other marketing variables influences market share directly as well as indirectly by interacting with country related intangible assets or simply country image the results of our empirical analysis show that a competitive analysis without the recognition of country image would be misleading we found that country specific intangible assets exist and that they significantly interact with marketing variables differently for u s and japanese brands in the subcompact car market in the usa brand popularity and advertising were found to be key factors for intangible assets for both the u s and the japanese brands brand popularity was the most significant factor for market share in both the short run and the long run japanese firms direct investment fdi in the target country directly influenced market share only in the short run several important implications for international marketing are presented

welfare distributional change and the measurement of social mobility a new approach to the measurement of welfare distributional change and social mobility is developed the novel feature of this model is the use of price dependent measures of individual and social welfare in evaluating t he magnitude and direction of the movement in the distribution in addition the proposed indexes of mobility are decomposed into the sum of between group and w ithin group mobility each measure is implemented for the united states over the period 1947 1982 it is found that in each year society is upwardly mobile rela tive to the 1947 distribution copyright 1986 by mit press

changes in the world distribution of income between 1950 and 1977 trends in the world distribution of income are much discussed and philosophised about the issue of increasing economic inequality among nonsocialist countries in the post war period is central to the debate about the international economic order in i969 the pearson commission report was already pointing to the widening gap between the developed and developing countries as a central issue of our time and was proposing the reduction of that gap as the main objective of international co operation according to that report gnp per capita had increased between i960 and i967 at annual rates of 2 5 and 3 6 in developing and developed countries respectively morawetz i978 found that the gap between the two sets of countries rose from i 2 6 fold in i950 to i3 2 fold in i975 other authors see a more complicated picture atkinson i975 for instance has argued that although the share of poor countries in world income probably declined between i950 and i970 that of the countries at the middle of the world distribution probably increased 2 what may be a mere assessment of relative growth performances among nonsocialist countries becomes a basic theoretical element in the radical stream of economic literature for authors like amin i974 emmanuel i972 and frank i978 the capitalist mode of development necessarily leads to the rich countries of the centre becoming richer and poor countries of the periphery becoming poorer in a degree depending on their involvement in international trade for them a widening gap between developed and developing countries is simply the statistical confirmation of an unavoidable consequence of the national and international capitalist system in the latter perspective the issue at stake is of such importance that the contrast between the abundance of theoretical literature and the lack of empirical work is striking the few existing studies of changes in world distribution provide an inadequate picture intra country income distributions are not taken into account observation periods do not exceed i5 years 8 for andic and peacock i96i and for beckerman and bacon i970 i5 for kirman and tomasini i969 socialist as well as some non socialist countries are excluded and national incomes are converted to u s dollars at official exchange rates 3 finally none of these studies covers the i970s although several shocks which might have affected world distribution occurred during that decade for the non socialist countries to which they refer the andic peacock and beckerman bacon studies found the gini coefficient almost constant over

the trend and the measurement of world inequality over extended periods of accounting abstract the principal result of this paper is the demonstration of a method for measuring an index of e g nominal gnp over extended periods of time and the inequality thereof snap shot inequality for specific points in 1964 1972 and 1980 is also reported and decomposed for six subgroups in 122 countries

international income inequality 2005 2011 what a difference 6 years can make while much attention has recently been given to the rising inequality in high income countries particularly the us inequality across countries has received less attention based on reports of the international comparison program which provide the most accurate measures of ppp income at the country level this study computes three highly recommended measures of intercountry income inequality for the years 2005 and 2011 a dramatic and perhaps unprecedented fall in intercountry inequality over the relatively short period of 6 years is noted as a correlate of the fall in intercountry inequality aggregate ppp gdp for six major high income countries is compared with that for three large developing countries and the dramatic increase over the 6 year period in the ratio of the total gdp of the three developing countries to that for the six high income countries is noted thus extending from the most accurate data the theme of the rise of the south articulated in human development report 2013

an index of inequality with applications to horizontal equity and social mobility horizontal equity and social mobility are discussed in terms of a non utilitarian social welfare function which takes account of the process by which an ex ante distribution is mapped into an ex post distribution by the tax system for example an index of inequality is proposed which decomposes into two components corresponding to vertical and horizontal equity respectively a functional form for the social welfare function is derived for the purposes of empirical work and an application to data for 5895 uk households is presented the paper contains a theoretical application of the index to a model of optimal taxation it is conventional to assess the merits of alternative public policies in terms of a trade off between equity and efficiency in practice however a change in say the tax system involves three effects first it may have incentive or disincentive effects leading to efficiency gains or losses secondly it may alter the distribution of welfare levels thirdly it may alter the ranking of individuals or households within the distribution these three effects correspond to efficiency vertical equity and we shall argue certain aspects of horizontal equity respectively and any assessment of a tax change must take into account all three the principal assumption of this paper is that government is concerned about the trade off between these three effects a strict utilitarian is concerned only with the consequences of an action and in the evaluation of a particular reform a utilitarian measure of social welfare is defined over the vector of ex post utilities no account is taken of the process by which the vector of ex ante utilities is mapped into the ex post vector and no ethical status is awarded to the ex ante distribution one does not have to adopt an entitlement theory of justice to believe that the utilitarian approach may ignore some relevant considerations such as the fairness of the redistributive process a striking example of this arises in the model used by mirrlees 11 to examine optimal income taxation in that model individuals have identical preferences defined over consumption and leisure and differ only in respect of their potential wage rates or ability levels clearly in the absence of taxation individual utility is an increasing function of ability suppose the government uses redistributive lump sum taxes to achieve the first best optimum then as mirrlees 11 12 shows the first best optimum for a utilitarian social welfare

managerial metric use in marketing decisions across 16 countries a cultural perspective research on metrics is consistently designated a priority by academics and practitioners however less is known about how culture and cross national differences can potentially impact metric use which is theoretically and managerially limiting this work develops a model that examines national and organizational cultural antecedents while controlling for the decision setting testing the model on data collected from 4384 managerial decisions from 1637 firms in 16 countries reveals that both levels of culture are associated with metric use but each has varying effects our results enable multinational executives to better understand and increase managerial metric use across different cultures and settings

normative indices for measuring social mobility this paper introduces relative and absolute indices of social mobility to each index there corresponds a different social welfare function when the symmetric mean of order 1 social welfare function is employed the relative index becomes the king 1983 index of social mobility

development and the elimination of poverty this essay argues that the drive toward a middle class style of life in developing countries has resulted over the past 30 odd years of conscious development effort in a series of negative consequences in diverse spheres persistence of inequality expansion of government neglect of agriculture and urban bias of education and research the class context of development the role of the middle class the characteristics and components of the middle class life style and the american contribution to its development are assessed after which the methodology and results of measuring the poor and the middle class in the us and elsewhere are considered measurement of the middle class can be attempted through ownership of articles such as automobiles through energy consumption or through income one estimate is that the global middle class increased from 200 million in 1950 to 800 million by 1980 through the addition of japan europe and some increase in the 3rd world the nature of middle class work and the consequences of the preference for middle class work on the part of national elites for local development efforts is described along with the related theme of the conflict between alleviation of poverty and development of an indigenous middle class in 3rd world countries china and brazil are viewed as the 2 extremes in this trade off the incentives to massive urban migration that occur in conjunction with development policies favoring the middle class are outlined finally it is argued that reaching for middle class status is an explanatory rather than a policy variable the social mechanisms that cause the spread of the middle class to take precedence over the alleviation of poverty need to be more closely examined

income mobility profiles abstract an income mobility profile is a graphical tool to portray income mobility and identify the association between individual movements and initial status which despite its importance when assessing the social relevance of mobility is often discounted by aggregate mobility indices

strategic market entry factors and market share achievement in japan in developing entry marketing strategies for new product markets companies might be advised to target product markets where significant market shares are likely to be achieved the literature on market share change is reviewed to identify situational and marketing strategy factors associated with market share achievement certain hypotheses suggested by this and related literatures were then tested using a database of products introduced into the japanese market the results of this analysis indicate that a few key situational and marketing strategy variables account for a large proportion of the variation in achieved market share in japan

how much income mobility is there in britain using the first four waves of the british household panel survey 1991 4 and a variety of methods we show that there is much mobility in household net income from one year to the next in britain however most income changes from one year to the next are not very large and when incomes are longitudinally averaged so that transitory variations are smoothed out substantial permanent income differences are revealed there is some evidence of greater mobility for those in the tails of the income distribution relative to the middle and for elderly persons compared to non elderly persons

the concept and measurement of horizontal inequity abstract this paper discusses the concept of horizontal equity and presents three formal principles as a basis for making comparisons of the extent of horizontal inequity produced by different redistributions a condition analogous to the lorenz criterion used for inequality comparisons is established under which the horizontal inequities of redistributions can be ranked without recourse to a cardinal measure of inequity ordinal comparisons are not possible in many cases the three principles suggest three properties that reasonable measures of horizontal inequity should possess a class of measures which satisfies the properties is proposed most other existing measures are found not to satisfy them

how much of observed economic mobility is measurement error iv methods to reduce measurement error bias with an application to vietnam research on economic growth and inequality inevitably raise issues concerning economic mobility because the relationship between long run inequality and short run inequality is mediated by income mobility for a given level of short run inequality greater mobility implies lower long run inequality yet empirical measures of both inequality and mobility are biased upward due to measurement error in income and expenditure data collected from household surveys this paper presents a straightforward method to remove this bias using instrumental variable estimates the method is applied to panel data from vietnam the results imply that at least 15 and perhaps as much as 42 of measured mobility is upward bias due to measurement error the results also suggest that measurement error accounts for at least 12 of measured inequality

the impact of income components on the distribution of family incomes attempts have recently been made to assign inequality contributions to various components of income this paper discusses the issues involved in such assignments and highlights the problems that follow from having a number of possible decomposition rules u s data on the distribution of family incomes are used to examine the relative influence of these income components and to evaluate empirically the performance of different decomposition rules a wide range of inequality contributions can be obtained even when restricted to only naturally derived decomposition rules some of the results are plainly absurd and serve to warn against the indiscriminate use of decomposition formulae without first investigating their properties

voting for redistribution under desert sensitive altruism we endow individuals that differ in skill levels and tastes for working with altruistic preferences for redistribution in a voting model where a unidimensional redistributive parameter is chosen by majority voting in a direct democracy when altruistic preferences are desert sensitive i e when there is a reluctance to redistribute from the hard working to the lazy we show that lower levels of redistribution emerge in political equilibrium we provide empirical evidence based on the issp 1992 dataset that preferences for redistribution are not purely selfish and that desert sensitive motivations play a significant role we estimate that preferences for redistribution are significantly more desert sensitive in the us than in europe we believe that differences in desert sensitive preferences for redistribution help explain the different social contracts that prevail in both continents

intercountry inequalities in income and index of net social progress evidence from recent data abstract intercountry income inequality is computed from real gdp data that became available recently from phase iv of international comparisons project similar inequality measures are also calculated for index of net social progress proposed by estes 1983 and for conventional gnp per capita although the three indicators are strongly and positively correlated intercountry inequality indices derived from these are rather dramatically different

the meaning and measurement of income mobility abstract income mobility may be seen as arising from two sources i the transfer of income among individuals with total income held constant and ii a change in the total amount of income available in this paper we propose several sensible properties defining the concept of income mobility and show that an easily applicable measure of mobility is uniquely implied by these properties we also show that the resulting measure is additively decomposable into the two sources listed above namely mobility due to the transfer of income within a given structure and mobility due to economic growth or contraction finally these results are compared and contrasted with other mobility concepts and measures in the literature journal of economic literature classification numbers d31 d63

inequality income growth and mobility the basic facts during the 1950s and 1960s mean wages in the united states grew rapidly and the dispersion around this growing mean changed very litde starting in the 1970s and continuing into the 1980s and 1990s these patterns were reversed mean wages grew slowly and inequality increased rapidly these changes in labor markets were reflected in changes in the distribution of family income the mean of the distribution of family income did increase after 1973 in spite of the near constancy of mean real wages as family members increased the number of hours they worked however the increase in inequality of wages was mirrored by an increase in the dispersion of family income a large descriptive literature has documented the rise in inequality while a smaller behavioral literature has sought to delineate the causes of this rise these changes in the distribution of family income a fected rates of poverty directly during the 1950s and 1960s temporary increases in poverty during recessions were more than offset by declines in poverty during economic expansions as long as the poor gained along with everyone else fi om the secular growth in the mean one could be confident that poverty rates would ratchet down this is exactly what happened as poverty rates fell from 22 4 percent in 1959 to 11 1 percent in 1973

a bibliometric analysis of the global branding literature and a research agenda this study examines the citations used in the global branding literature gbl and evaluates the knowledge structure of this area of research to date our bibliometric analysis involves an examination of 120 global branding articles in business related research we employ multidimensional scaling to reveal a range of intellectual influences that have helped shape the gbl the foundation of knowledge in the gbl is uncovered by analyzing co citation data to identify important topical influences in the formation of global branding research the conceptual framework developed incorporates five areas with important implications for the future development of global branding as an area of inquiry these major research topics in the gbl are international branding strategy brand positioning brand country origin brand concept image and brand performance we leverage resource and capability based paradigms and use the five underpinning knowledge groups to propose an agenda for future research that fills existing gaps and offers the potential to advance and enrich the gbl

matching product catgeory and country image perceptions a framework for managing country of origin effects the study of country of origin coo effects examines how consumers perceive products emanating from a particular country this study examines coo in terms of the fit between countries and product categories a framework is suggested which matches the importance of product category dimensions with the perceived image of the country of origin along the same dimensions such matches or mismatches can be either favorable or unfavorable managers can use product country match information to assess consumers purchase intentions and assist them in managing their product s coo data collected from consumers in ireland mexico and the united states demonstrate the product country match framework and its strategic implications

measures of distributional change an axiomatic approach in recent years a number of interesting papers have appeared in the general field of the analysis of changes in a frequency distribution the most common applications of such analysis are in the areas of income and wealth re distribution and the contributions have usually focussed on a particular specialised issue such as mobility of individuals within a structure or of horizontal inequity as opposed to vertical inequality implicit in the comparison of two distributions a number of approaches to each of these problems have been suggested and indeed several specific practical indices of mobility or inequity have been proposed 1 whilst some of these can be shown to have very useful features in their application it is probably fair to say that most derive from an ad hoc approach to the particular aspect of the problem on which the author had focussed it is interesting to note that comparatively few papers attempt to exploit the similarities involved in each of these issues all this contrasts rather sharply with the state of play in an obviously closely related game that of the measurement of inequality much of the essential foundation of the problem of measuring inequality as we presently understand it seems to be more or less sorted out in a systematic fashion roughly speaking what may be done is as follows given

another perspective on changes in international inequality from 1950 to 1980 abstract real income data derived from the third phase of the international comparisons project are used to compute theil s population weighted indices of intercountry inequality for several years between 1950 and 1980 contrary to some recently reported results a substantial increase in inequality is observed internationally comparable consumption data indicate consumption inequality increased more than income inequality

intergenerational exchange mobility and economic welfare the concepts of exchange and structural mobility are introduced and their relationship with the notion of equality of opportunity discussed it is then shown that exchange mobility can have an impact on social welfare when the utility of any one generation is dependent on the consumption levels of overlapping generations whether such consumption interrelationships imply a preference for mobility or the reverse depends on whether the marginal utility of current consumption is raised or lowered by an increase in the consumption level of the associated generation the rest of this paper examines these two cases in the context of a simple two class family model the analysis is concerned with the description of the optimal intergenerational behaviour within this framework in order to be able to say anything substantial however it is necessary to impose some restrictions on the structure of the utility function one restriction which has some appeal and which yields plausible patterns of optimal policy is that intergenerational links through the utility function be not too strong in a sense that is made specific in the paper imposing this condition one can show how intra generational equity is affected both by intergenerational considerations and by the inherited past where intragenerational transfers involve efficiency losses a simple tax model is examined the circumstances under which starting with no taxes the tax rates converge are worked out in both the cases where the utility function has a pro as well as an anti mobility bias finally a specific utility function is taken in which the fathers utility depends not only on his own consumption but also on the average consumption of his son and himself in this case the utility function has a pro mobility bias and one can evaluate the response of the long run tax rate to parameters that measure mobility and equality using a similation model one can also assess the speed of convergence and the sensitivity of the tax rates to the parameters

a cross cultural study of interpersonal information exchange research conducted primarily in the united states has shown that interpersonal influence arising from opinion exchange behavior is an important factor in consumers product adoption and brand choice decisions an important managerial question in the international arena is whether information giving and seeking behaviors depend on culture in a study representing eleven nationalities we explore the role of culture in moderating consumers opinion exchange behavior results indicate that the cultural characteristics of power distance and uncertainty avoidance hofstede 1980 influence the focus of consumers product information search activities but not their tendencies to share product related opinions with others following earlier opinion leadership studies we find that individual characteristics such as product category interest and involvement are most indicative of active opinion leadership behavior

market knowledge diversification and export expansion the research focuses on the export expansion process of small and middle sized manufacturing firms and some of its correlates diversification and geographical market distribution means of acquiring information and modes of international distribution the study reveals the overwhelming influence on export expansion of information acquired from business transactions as opposed to reliance on private or public information services the impact of market diversification and its nature is confirmed policy implications are suggested

a comparison of group differences in food consumption using household refuse five explanations of group differences in food consumption national identity ethnicity region income and minority status are tested data on consumption of 38 food items come from household refuse analysis for 11 social groups differences are best explained by regional proximity followed by minority status income was least powerful although still statistically significant

values versus regulations how culture plays its role this study examines the impact of culture on regulation and corruption our empirical results suggest that cultural values have significant effects on countries regulatory policies levels of corruption and economic development contrary to the conclusions drawn by others this study shows no significant relationship between the regulatory policies of countries and their perceived levels of corruption thus evidence of the public choice view toward entry regulation derived in related studies seems to be at least attenuated

international inequalities in human development and real income abstract two well recommended measures are used to compute intercountry inequalities in real gdp per capita ry and the index of human development hdi despite very high positive correlation between ry and hdi the inequality measures reveal dramatically different pictures

social contagion and income heterogeneity in new product diffusion a meta analytic test standard diffusion models capture social contagion only coarsely and do not allow one to operationalize different contagion mechanisms moreover there is increasing skepticism about the importance of contagion and as has long been known s shaped diffusion curves can also result from heterogeneity in the propensity to adopt we present hypotheses about conditions under which specific contagion mechanisms and income heterogeneity are more pronounced and test these hypotheses using a meta analysis of the q p ratio in applications of the bass diffusion model the ratio is positively associated with the gini index of income inequality in a country supporting the heterogeneity in thresholds interpretation the ratio also varies as predicted by the gamma shifted gompertz diffusion model but the evidence vanishes after controlling for national culture as to contagion the q p ratio varies with the four hofstede dimensions of national culture for three of them in a direction consistent with the social contagion interpretation furthermore products with competing standards have a higher q p ratio which is again consistent with the social contagion interpretation finally we find effects of national culture only for products without competing standards suggesting that technological effects and culturally moderated social contagion effects might not operate independently from each other

the olympic effect why should countries offer to host costly mega events such as the olympic games we show that hosting a mega event increases exports this effect is statistically robust permanent and large trade is over 20 higher for host countries interestingly unsuccessful bids to host the olympics have a similar impact on exports we conclude that the olympic effect on trade is attributable to the signal a country sends when bidding to host the games rather than the act of actually holding a mega event we develop an appropriate formal model and derive conditions under which liberalising countries will signal through a mega event bid

global inequality in well being dimensions abstract this paper contributes to the literature on global inequality in multidimensional well being by examining inter country disparities in the longevity knowledge and standard of material living components of the well known and widely used human development index for the years 1992 2004 it differs from previous studies by examining global inequality in each of the components of this index alongside that of the index as a whole thus side stepping ambiguities over weighting that are inherent to multidimensional well being indices the gini coefficient both population and non population weighted is used to measure the extent of inequality results indicate that the different components often provide very different information to the index as a whole especially with respect to changes in global inequality over time most component variables show declines in global inequality whereas the longevity component exhibits increased inequality since 1992

a longitudinal assessment on the economic effects of hosting major sporting events hosting major sporting events mses has become a globalized strategy for many countries this paper is to incorporate event study and dynamic panel data analysis with annual secondary data to exam

intercountry inequalities in income and basic needs indicators a recent perspective abstract large crosscountry samples are used to compute intercountry inequalities in income and three indicators of basic needs fulfillment first the familiar picture of high intercountry inequality in income coexisting with low inequality in basic needs indicators is reaffirmed for the 1980s second income inequality seems to have continued its increasing trend third however while the pace of increase in inequality in conventional gdp per capita has accelerated accentuation of inequality in real gdp per capita has slowed fourth inequality in basic needs indicators continues to decline last caution is urged in interpreting the very low values observed for some indices of inequality in basic needs fulfillment during the 1980s

welfare based income insecurity in the us and germany evidence from harmonized panel data this paper develops normative approaches for measuring individual level income insecurity using concepts derived from expected utility theory and prospect theory we build a suite of measures designed to capture various facets of psychologically distressing income risk we present an application for the us and germany from 1993 2013 employing conditionally heteroskedastic fixed effects models to generate predictive densities for future incomes our results reveal much higher levels of income risk in the us relative to germany which can be mostly attributed to a higher level of autonomous time invariant volatility state by state variations in liberal conservative political administrations partially explain our results and we find some evidence that trade exposure is a contributing factor in the us

economic and social convergence in colombia royuela v and garcia g a economic and social convergence in colombia regional studies gross domestic product gdp has usually been used as a proxy for human well being nevertheless other social aspects should also be considered such as life expectancy infant mortality educational enrolment and crime issues this paper investigates economic and social convergence between regions in colombia in the period 1975 2005 the main results confirm that there is convergence in colombia in key social variables although not in the classic economic variable gdp per capita it is also found that spatial autocorrelation reinforces convergence processes through deepening market and social factors while isolation condemns regions to non convergence

three meanings of intergenerational mobility we axiomatize three different motivations for being concerned about intergenerational mobility mobility as a description of movement as an indication of equality of opportunity and as an indication of equality of life chances these three motivations are shown to be incompatible none of the existing measures is acceptable as an indicator of equality of opportunity or equality of life chances we propose two new measures of intergenerational mobility which more adequately reflect these concerns

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

should cities go for the gold the long term impacts of hosting the olympics the summer olympics bring hundreds of thousands of visitors and generate upward of 10 billion in spending for the host city this large influx of tourism dollars is only part of the overall impact of hosting the olympic games in order to host the visitors and sporting events cities must make sizable investments in infrastructure such as airports arenas and highways additionally the publicity and international exposure of a host city may benefit international trade and capital flows proponents argue that this investment will pay off through increased economic growth but research confirming these claims is lacking this paper examines whether hosting an olympiad improves a city s long term growth in order to control for the self selection of cities that host olympic games this paper matches olympic host cities with cities that were finalists for the olympic games but were not selected by the international olympic committee a difference in difference estimator examines post olympic impacts for host cities between 1950 and 2005 regression results provide no long term impacts of hosting an olympics on two measures of population real gross domestic product per capita and trade openness jel o18 r11

factor decomposition of cross country income inequality 1960 1990 abstract in this paper we present esteban s 1994 esteban j 1994 la desigualdad interregional en europa y en espana descripcion y analisis in esteban j m a vives x dirs crecimiento y convergencia regional en espana y en europa vol 2 instituto de analisis economico decomposition of the theil index of inequality over per capita incomes into the unweighted sum of the inequality indices of i the productivity per employed worker ii the employment rate iii the active over working age population rate and iv the working age over total population rate each of these factors clearly have different meanings for analysis as well as for policy we apply this factoral decomposition to a set of 120 countries we also contrast the empirical findings with the results obtained for the 23 oecd countries oecd labour force statistics several issues paris

preferences for redistribution in the land of opportunities this paper explores how individual preferences for redistribution depend on future income prospects in addition to estimating the impact of individuals socioeconomic background and of their subjective perceptions of future mobility we employ panel data to construct dobjectivet measures of expected gains and losses from redistribution for different categories of individuals we find that such measures have considerable explanatory power and perform better than dgeneral mobilityt indexes we also find that preferences for redistribution respond to individual beliefs on what determines one s position in the social ladder ceteris paribus people who believe that the american society offers equal opportunities are more averse to redistribution d 2004 published by elsevier b v

seeking a comprehensive measure of economic well being annuitisation versus capitalisation abstract biases in inequality measures arise when components of comprehensive measures of economic well being are estimated using cross section data biases under annuitisation are small and bounded unlike biases under capitalisation this recommends the annuity over the capitalisation approach

stochastic dominance in mobility analysis abstract this paper introduces a technique for mobility dominance and compares the degree of earnings mobility of men in the usa from 1970 to 1995 the highest mobility is found in the 1975 1980 or 1980 1985 periods

composite indices of physical quality of life basic needs fulfilment and income a principal component representation abstract in the context of international comparisons the multivariate method of principal components is suggested for computing composite indices of economic development that capture per capita income basic needs fulfilment and other possible indicators of well being the method is conceptually appealing easy to apply and seems promising in several directions two illustrative applications are given one develops a composite index based on the three pqli constituents and per capita gnp for 147 countries in the other a composite index of basic needs fulfilment is first computed for 82 countries and then a more inclusive measure that also takes account of per capita gnp is derived

inequality adjusted income growth we introduce and characterize a new measure of aggregate income growth that allows us to give more weight to individuals with lower individual income growth our measure includes several important measures of directional mobility encountered in the literature the empirical application compares the measure of income growth between the usa and germany and finds that giving more weight to individuals with lower income growth reverses the ranking

international income mobility abstract we perform a novel analysis of the international mobility of per capita gnp we find general but not unambiguous support for the notion that world income mobility increased between 1972 and 1992 counterpointing the increased inequality over this period

earnings distribution and inequality over time education versus relative position and cohort this paper constructs a theoretical model for analyzing the earnings distribution over time and provides an estimation procedure for the inequality of earnings over time the theoretical model incorporates gibrat s so called law of proportionate effect galton s regression toward the mean and serial correlation of the error terms under the condition that the density function of earnings for each age cohort in japan is distributed as log logistic an emphasis is placed upon comparison of the influence of the relative position in the distribution with the influence of education on earnings finally the coefficients of variation over time are presented copyright 1991 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

turnover activity in wealth portfolios we examine several subsets of the wealthiest individuals in the us and the uk that are compiled by forbes magazine and the sunday times since these are named subsets we can calculate the returns to wealth portfolios and calibrate a statistical equilibrium model of wealth distribution that accounts for the power law of wealth and the asymmetric laplace distribution of portfolio returns the model provides a relative measure of turnover activity that indicates how often changes in the composition of the wealthiest portfolios occur finally we investigate trends in equality mobility and turnover activity

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

measuring social mobility abstract the paper considers the ranking of mobility matrices in a simple markov model of social mobility the approach is the dynamic counterpart ot the static inequality ranking of income distributions by the lorenz curve the derived partial ordering is motivated by welfare considerations is shown to be equivalent to same intuitive mobility concepts and is used to screen some immobility indices the equivalence of the ranking with the permanent income lorenz ordering gives support to the claim that this approach is the natural extension of kolm s the optimal production of social justice in public economics j margolis and h guitton eds macmillan london 1969 atkinson s on the measurement of inequality j econ theory2 1970 244 263 and dasgupta sen and starrett s notes on the measurement of inequality j econ theory6 1973 180 187 approaches journal of economic literature classification numbers d31 d63 j62

measuring social mobility as unpredictability by associating mobility with the unpredictability of social states new measures of social mobility may be constructed we propose a family of three state by state and aggregate scalar predictability measures the first set of measures is based on the transition matrix the second uses a sampling approach and permits statistical testing of the hypothesis of perfect mobility providing a new justification for the use of the x2 statistic the third satisfies the demanding criterion of period consistency an empirical example demonstrates the usefulness of the new measures to complement existing ones in the literature

intergenerational health mobility an empirical approach based on the echp despite the importance of the study of health mobility few attempts have been made to measure intergenerational mobility not only in the european union but also in other countries such as united states this article is focused on the study of intergenerational health mobility using data from the european community household panel echp in particular the relationships between self assessed health of parents and their sons are analysed the evidence obtained suggests that in spain sons reported health depends significantly on the self assessed health of their fathers

conditions influencing headquarters and foreign subsidiary roles in marketing activities and their effects on performance in this study we examine the extent to which foreign subsidiaries are responsible for the development and implementation of marketing activities as compared with these activities being controlled by headquarters we propose and test a model of conditions that affect such headquarters and subsidiary roles and explore the extent to which the alignment of these roles with certain conditions is associated with product performance our findings suggest that the more closely headquarters and subsidiary roles in marketing activities are aligned with relational industry and market conditions the greater market share tends to be

critical reflections on the economic impact assessment of a mega event the case of 2002 fifa world cup abstract sport tourism has received growing attention as a source of generating significant revenue and contributing major economic benefits to host cities regions and countries however current methods for assessing economic impact have had variable success in estimating tourist numbers and expenditure directly attributable to a sport tourism mega event this paper reports on the assessment of one such event the 2002 fifa world cup in south korea using an estimation method that excluded tourists whose travel was non event related the survey research conducted during the event established that 57 7 of total tourist arrivals during the period of the event could be classified as either directly and indirectly attracted by the world cup using this data it was calculated that the world cup generated an economic impact of us 1 35 billion of output sales us 307 million of income and us 713 million of value added for south korea the results also showed that foreign world cup tourists provided a much higher yield compared with foreign leisure tourists spending an estimated 1 8 times as much inclusion of the expenditure by non world cup tourists 42 3 in the calculations of impact would have resulted in a significant overestimation due to the further multiplication of the expanded figures by an input output model misleading the net economic impact of the event the use of survey data to distinguish event from non event tourists and their respective expenditure clearly illustrates some of the methodological pitfalls associated with forecasting that is simply based on generic tourist data furthermore the data generated by this assessment of net direct expenditure and economic impact using the input output analysis can be used as a comparison point for other mega sport events in terms of further research it is evident that existing models of impact assessment have not adequately conceptualized aversion and diversion effects and this begs the future inclusion of these concepts in economic impact forecasting for mega events

the use of cross section microdata in life cycle models an application to inequality theory in nonstationary economies this paper examines the appropriate use of cross section microdata in life cycle models drawing upon recent empirical work based upon panel data we illustrate how these results can be used as priors to generate a distribution of life cycle earnings such a surrogate distribution can be shown to possess the same properties as actual distributions we focus attention particularly upon the treatment of economic growth and the unobservable components of earnings in the final section of the paper we show how such distributions might be used in inequality analysis

the effects of culture and socioeconomics on the performance of global brand image strategies developing and managing brand image is an important part of a firm s marketing program however little research has been done 1 on linking the use of brand image strategies to product performanc