The distribution of expenditure in Spain, 1973-74 to 1980-81

This paper examines how far we can go in establishing normative conclusions with regard to the evolution of inequality over time, making use of statistical methods which do not need either too specific assumptions about individual preferences, or their recovery by means of complex and expensive econometric methods. The decomposition of the change in money inequality into a real and a price effect occupies the center of the analysis. We have used statistical Laspeyres type price indices which are household specific, and a parametrization which captures the weight one is prepared to give to household size in the definition of equivalent expenditure per person. The central finding is that the improvement in real inequality in Spain from 1973-74 to 1980-81 is always greater than the improvement in money inequality. Changes in relative prices have been less damaging to the poor than to the rich, and have had a uniform impact across groups from different partitions. The explanatory power of overall inequality provided by different characteristics is studied by means of statistical constructs independent of the equivalence scale used

Relative and absolute poverty : the case of México, 1992-2004

This paper advocates that although an absolute notion of poverty should remain an essential ingredient in the evaluation of the standard of living in developing and transition economies, it is time that relative poverty begins to be systematically estimated for those same economies. This prescription is applied to México for the 1992-2004 period, where the Fox Administration has fixed for the first time an absolute poverty line for 2000. To facilitate comparisons with developed countries, the relative poverty line is fixed at 50% of mean equivalent expenditures. Absolute and relative poverty behave in opposite ways during the 1992-2000 business cycle, but both decline significantly during the 2000-04 stagnation period. Relative poverty is above absolute poverty from 1992 to 1994, below it during 1996-98, and above it again in 2000-04. In any case, relative poverty in México is well above relative poverty in developed countries

A complete model for welfare analysis

Taking advantage of some of the lessons learned from income inequality comparisons over time and/or across space, we provide a complete framework of analysis to compare the social or aggregate welfare of independent cross-sections of household income and non-income household characteristics.This framework serves to clarify a number of traditional issues on i) the proper domain of the social evaluation problem; ii) the need to consider alternative mean invariant inequality notions; iii) the decomposition of changes in real welfare into changes of the mean at constant prices and changes in real inequality; iv) the nature of the interhousehold welfare comparability assumptions implicit in all empirical wok, and v) the strong implications of separability assumptions necessary for inequality and welfare decomposition by population subgroups. This review essay, written with an operational aim in mind, extends and updates the treatment found, for example, in Deaton and Muellbauer (1980). The main novelty is the analysis of the simplifying implications of the condition that income adjustment procedures for taking into account non-income needs are independent of household utility levelsan assumption originally introduced in the theoretical literature by Lewbel (1989) and Blackorby and Donaldson (1989), which is extended here to the absolute case

Interpersonal welfare comparisons, redistributive effects, and horizontal inequieties in the income tax system

Vertical and horizontal equity principies occupy the core of income tax systems evaluation. Vertical inequality is measured in terms of relative or absolute income inequality indices, as in the analysis of the redistributive effects (RE) of progressive tax systems. Horizontal equity measurement has been more controversial. Classical horizontal inequities (HI), undestood as unequal treatment of equals or close similars, should be distinguished from reranking (RKG) caused by equity and non equity tax breaks, in actual tax schemes. We propose to integrate the measurement of RE, HI, and RKG in a social welfare framework where tax units non-income differences in needs are recognized. Additively decomposable measurement instruments by population subgroup are found essential to clarify the issues involved

Difficulties in the use of equivalence scales for normative purpsoses

Can we make welfare comparisons of households of different characteristics on the basis of their observed behavior in relation to cornmodity demands? This paper reviews sorne of the fundamental difficulties encountered in the attempt to use the concept oí an equivalence scale as a vehic1e for introducing demographics and other characteristics into empirical demand analysis and, at the same time, for establishing interpersonal comparisons oí wel1-being

Interpersonal welfare comparisons, redistributive effects, and horizontal inequieties in the income tax system.

Vertical and horizontal equity principies occupy the core of income tax systems evaluation. Vertical inequality is measured in terms of relative or absolute income inequality indices, as in the analysis of the redistributive effects (RE) of progressive tax systems. Horizontal equity measurement has been more controversial. Classical horizontal inequities (HI), undestood as unequal treatment of equals or close similars, should be distinguished from reranking (RKG) caused by equity and non equity tax breaks, in actual tax schemes. We propose to integrate the measurement of RE, HI, and RKG in a social welfare framework where tax units non-income differences in needs are recognized. Additively decomposable measurement instruments by population subgroup are found essential to clarify the issues involved.Income tax systems; Vertical inequality; Horizontal inequality; Social welfare; Additivie decomposability by population subgroup;

Economics research in Spain during the 1990's : a literature review.

This paper reviews the results of the literature on the ranking of centers of excellence in economics. There are two objectives: (1) to examine the evolution during the 1990s of certain features of economics research—such as the gap that exists between the US and the rest of the world, the dominant position of the UK within Europe, and the low productivity of economic scholars everywhere—and (2) to document the significant progress that Spanish research institutions have experienced during this period. Results by several broad fields of specialization are summarized here for the first time.Economics research; Rankings; US–Europe gap;

A complete model for welfare analysis.

Taking advantage of some of the lessons learned from income inequality comparisons over time and/or across space, we provide a complete framework of analysis to compare the social or aggregate welfare of independent cross-sections of household income and non-income household characteristics.This framework serves to clarify a number of traditional issues on i) the proper domain of the social evaluation problem; ii) the need to consider alternative mean invariant inequality notions; iii) the decomposition of changes in real welfare into changes of the mean at constant prices and changes in real inequality; iv) the nature of the interhousehold welfare comparability assumptions implicit in all empirical wok, and v) the strong implications of separability assumptions necessary for inequality and welfare decomposition by population subgroups. This review essay, written with an operational aim in mind, extends and updates the treatment found, for example, in Deaton and Muellbauer (1980). The main novelty is the analysis of the simplifying implications of the condition that income adjustment procedures for taking into account non-income needs are independent of household utility levelsan assumption originally introduced in the theoretical literature by Lewbel (1989) and Blackorby and Donaldson (1989), which is extended here to the absolute case.Welfare; Inequality; Equivalence scales; descomposition by population subgroups;

The evaluation of citation distributions.

This paper reviews a number of recent contributions that demonstrate that a blend of welfare economics and statistical analysis is useful in the evaluation of the citations received by scientific papers in the periodical literature. The paper begins by clarifying the role of citation analysis in the evaluation of research. Next, a summary of results about the citation distributions’ basic features at different aggregation levels is offered. These results indicate that citation distributions share the same broad shape, are highly skewed, and are often crowned by a power law. In light of this evidence, a novel methodology for the evaluation of research units is illustrated by comparing the high- and low-citation impact achieved by the U.S., the European Union, and the rest of the world in 22 scientific fields. However, contrary to recent claims, it is shown that mean normalization at the sub-field level does not lead to a universal distribution. Nevertheless, among other topics subject to ongoing research, it appears that this lack of universality does not preclude sensible normalization procedures to compare the citation impact of articles in different scientific fields.

The measurement of structural and exchange income mobility.

Chakravarty, Dutta and Weymark (1985) present operational axioms for an ethical index of income mobility that are best suited for a two period world. This paper suggests a decomposition of this index into two terms: (i) an index of structural or snapshot mobility, which captures the welfare effect of differences in the inequality of the cross-section income distributions; and (ii) an index of exchange or rerankings mobility, which captures the welfare impact of rank reversals between the first- and the second-period income distributions. Income inequality reductions and rank reversals are always welfare enhancing. The properties of all the income mobility concepts introduced in the paper do not require any new value judgements beyond the traditional ones.Distributional change; Exchange and structural mobility; Income mobility;