The Distributional Incidence of Growth: A Social Welfare Approach

This paper provides a normative framework for the assessment of the distributional incidence of growth. By removing the anonymity axiom, such framework is able to evaluate the individual income changes over time and the reshuffling of individuals along the income distribution that are determined by the pattern of income growth. We adopt a rank dependent social welfare function expressed in terms of initial rank and individual income change and we obtain partial and complete dominance conditions over different growth paths. These dominance conditions account for the different components determining the overall impact of growth, that is the size of growth and its vertical and horizontal incidence. We then provide an empirical application for Italy: this analysis shows the distributional impact of the recent economic crisis suffered by the Italian populaltion.     

The Distribution and Redistribution of Opportunity

Recent theories of distributive justice focus on individual opportunities as the appropriate standard for distributive judgements. To translate this philosophical view into concrete public policy, three branches of economic literature have arisen, which we draw together here and critically assess. These concern ( i ) the measurement of individuals' opportunity sets, ( ii ) the measurement of the degree of inequality present in a distribution of opportunities, and ( iii ) the design of redistribution mechanisms intended to increase the degree of 'opportunity equality'. The purpose of the exposition is to unify the three themes, to give a flavour in non‐technical terms of what is going on in these very active literatures, and to indicate areas which remain open for research.     

On multidimensional poverty rankings of binary attributes

We address the problem of ranking distributions of attributes in terms of poverty, when the attributes are represented by binary variables. To accomplish this task, we identify a suitable notion of “multidimensional poverty line” and characterize axiomatically the Head-Count and the Attribute-Gap poverty rankings, which are the natural counterparts of the most widely used income poverty indices. Finally, we apply our methodology and compare our empirical results with those obtained with some other well-known poverty measures.     

Poverty,inequality and growth in Albania

This article studies the distribution of well‐being and, specifically, the degree of poverty and deprivation in Albania, in the years 2002 and 2005, using Living Standard Measurement Surveys (LSMS). The distribution analysis is performed by applying both one‐dimensional and multidimensional approaches, in particular to better examine the link between economic growth, inequality and poverty in Albania. Furthermore, by estimating a non‐monetary indicator, as proposed by Bossert et al. ( 2007 ), and a nonlinear principal component model together with a probit model, the paper focuses on the multidimensional measures of poverty to address the relationship between poverty and socio‐economic factors. Our evidence shows that absolute poverty decreased from 2002 to 2005 while national relative poverty increased; economic growth reduced poverty in Albania over the observed period; and living in rural and mountain areas, being female, poorly educated and with a large family increased the probability of suffering from deprivation.     

Inequality of opportunity in sub-Saharan Africa

Inequality of opportunity is defined as the difference in individuals’ outcome systematically correlated with morally irrelevant pre-determined circumstances, such as ethnicity, socio-economic background, area of birth. This definition has been extensively studied by economists on the assumption that, in addition to being normatively undesirable, it can be related to low potentials for growth. However, empirical estimations of inequality of opportunity require accessing rich data sources, rarely available in poorer countries. In this paper, we exploit 13 consumption household surveys to evaluate inequality of opportunity in 10 Sub-Saharan African countries. According to our results, the portion of total inequality that can be attributed to exogenous circumstances is between 40% and 56% for the generality of countries. Our estimates are significantly higher than what has been found by previous studies. We detect a positive association between total consumption inequality and inequality of opportunity, and we study the different sources of unequal opportunities. The place of birth and the education of the father appear to exert the most relevant role in shaping inequality of opportunity in the region.