May growth lead to higher deprivation despite higher satisfaction ?

In a relative deprivation framework, unless inequality is reduced, growth is associated with both higher satisfaction and higher deprivation. This may help explain the discontent with growth despite its benefits. As is well known in the literature, knowledge of the population's mean income and Lorenz curve is all that is needed to analyze a distribution, so that this can also be used to assess the satisfaction and deprivation of each individual. Given the normalization used to derive the satisfaction and deprivation measures, satisfaction and deprivation add up to the mean income for the population as a whole as well as for each individual.Economic Theory&Research,Inequality,Poverty Impact Evaluation,,Labor Policies

Are High Income Individuals Better Stock Market Investors?

This paper presents evidence that the corporate stock owned by high income investors appreciates substantially faster than the stock owned by investors with lower incomes. Those with very high incomes enjoy the greatest success on their investments while those with incomes under $20,000 have the least success. The evidence indicates that the differences are large and that they have persisted for a long time.

Welfare Dominance: An Application to Commodity Taxation

In this paper, we suggest a method which enables the user to identify commodities that all individuals who can agree on certain weak assumptions with regard to the social welfare function will agree upon as worth subsidizing or taxing in the absence of efficiency considerations. The method is based on an extension of the stochastic dominance criteria and is illustrated using data from Israel.

Welfare dominance and the design of excise taxation in Cote d'Ivoire

Governments in developing countries are continuously searching for new and improved tax bases. Existing methods of taxation in these countries frequently fall short of meeting acceptable criteria of efficiency, equity and administrative ease. This paper argues that there is a compelling fiscal rationale for encouraging greater reliance on taxing the consumption of electrical and telephone (ET) services. Greater emphasis on this selective commodity tax base would contribute to the achievement of taxpayer equity and would be administratively easy to impose. In addition, the efficiency characteristics of this form of taxation may also add to the attractiveness of the ET base.Economic Theory&Research,Environmental Economics&Policies,Public Sector Economics&Finance,Banks&Banking Reform,Inequality

The Diffusion of Innovations: A Methodological Reappraisal

Studies of diffusion have traditionally relied on specific distributions-primarily the logistic- to characterize and estimate those processes.We argue here that such approach gives rise to serious problems of comparability and interpretation, and may result in large biases inthe estimates of the parameters of interest. We propose instead the Gini's expected mean differenceas ameasure of diffusion speed, discuss its advantages over the traditional approach, and tackle with it the problems of truncated processes, inter-group comparisons, and related issues. We also elaborateon the use of the hazardrate, and suggest some possible extensions. The diffusion of CT scanners is presented as an illustration.

The Optimal Size of a Tax Collection Agency

This paper addresses the optimal degree of law enforcement regarding tax evasion. It derives the conditions that characterize the optimal size of a tax collection agency, and then provides a simple interpretation of the conditions in terms of excess burden.The paper clarified earlier findings that suggest that the optimal size should be set higher than a simple cost-benefit calculation would indicate. It concludes with a numerical example that illustrates the optimality condition and demonstrates that a policy based on a naive cost-benefit analysis of the tax collection agency could result in a substantial overcommitment of resources.

Inequality and Social Welfare

This paper provides a review of part of the literature on inequality and social welfare, with a special focus on the Gini index. The paper first presents the extended Gini index used for measuring inequality, as well as the source decomposition of the Gini used to analyze how changes in income and consumption sources affect overall inequality. The paper then provides a wide range of policy applications of the source decomposition of the extended Gini index, including techniques for analyzing the impact on inequality of the targeting of programs as opposed to the rules for the allocation of benefits among program participants.Inequality; Social welfare

Inequality and the accounting period

Income inequality typically declines with the length of time taken into account for measurement. This note derives an exact analytical relationship between the accounting period and inequality as measured by the Gini index. The formal relationship is similar to the decomposition of the coefficient of variation. The methodology is illustrated with panel data on urban wages from Mexico. It is found that the effect of the accounting period on inequality is sensitive to the properties of the Gini correlations between the periodical incomes. Reporting this type of correlation enables the evaluation of the impact of the length of the accounting period on inequality.

On Choosing a Flat-Rate Income Tax Schedule

This paper applies a numerical optimization technique using microunit tax data to the problem of choosing the parameters of a flat-rate tax system, should one be desired. Our approach is to first formulate explicit objectives that a flat-rate tax might reasonably be designed to meet, such as minimizing the extent of changes in households' tax burdens and minimizing the efficiency cost of the tax system. The next step uses an optimization algorithm to calculate the flat-rate schedule which comes closest to meeting the objectives,subject to the constraint that it raise the same revenue as the current incometax system. The calculations are carried out using a sample of 947 tax returns randomly drawn from the Treasury Tax File for 1977 which are updated to repro-duce the pattern of tax returns that would be filed in 1982.The analysis shows that the flat-rate system which minimizes the sum of the absolute deviations in tax liabilities features a marginal tax rate between 0.204 and 0.254, though a different definition of tax burden changes which puts more emphasis on reproducing the tax burdens of high-income households has an optimal marginal tax rate of 0.382. We also derive the optimal flat-rate schedules when another objective is to minimize the efficiency cost of the tax system.

Why World Redistribution Fails

An optimal linear world income tax that maximizes a border-neutral social welfare function provides a drastic reduction in world consumption inequality, dropping the Gini coefficient from 0.69 to 0.25. In contrast an optimal decentralized (i.e., within countries) redistribution has miniscule effect on world income inequality. Thus, the traditional public finance concern about the excess burden of redistribution cannot explain why there is so little world redistribution. Actual foreign aid is vastly lower than the transfers under the simulated world income tax, suggesting that countries such as the United States either place a much lower value on the welfare of foreigners or else expect that a very significant fraction of cross-border transfers is wasted. The product of the welfare weight and one minus the share of transfers that are wasted constitutes an implied weight that the United States assigns to foreigners. We calculate that value to be as low as 1/2000 of the value put on the welfare of an American, suggesting that U.S. policy implicitly assumes either that essentially all transfers are wasted or places essentially no value on the welfare of the citizens of the poorest countries.