Showing off to the new neighbors? Income,socioeconomic status and consumption patterns of internal migrants

This paper analyses incomes and socioeconomic status of internal migrants over time and in comparison to their new neighbors and investigates whether status consumption is a way for newly arrived city dwellers to signal their social standing. Using a novel dataset from the emerging economy of Kazakhstan we find that internal migrants earn an income and status premium for their move. In a comparison to indigenous city dwellers their earnings and household incomes are not significantly different; however, mobile households report a significantly higher subjective socio-economic status. Exploiting expenditure data, we find that recent migrant households gain status from using visible consumption to impress their new neighbors. This signaling might be used as adaptation to the new economic and social environment or to gain access to social capital.     

社会收入对西部城乡收入差距的影响——基于11省市2000户居民的调查数据

对城乡收入差距的研究最终将关注于真实收入的差异,本文依据对西部地区11个省市的2000个镇(村)2000户居民的调查数据的统计分析,发现西部地区社会收入的差距比经济收入的差距大得多;社会收入会对城乡收入差距产生直接影响,使西部地区城乡收入比扩大10.4%。因此,建议重视缩小西部地区城乡社会收入差距的政策设计、增加西部地区农村居民的社会收入、推行城乡一体化的社会保障体系、改革收入统计。     

Status, affluence, and inequality: Rank-based comparisons in games of status

We examine the effects of changes in the income distribution in an economy where agents' utility depends both on consumption and on their rank in the distribution of conspicuous consumption. We introduce a new methodology to compare the behavior of agents that occupy the same rank in the two different income distributions but typically have different levels of incomes. Here, an increase in incomes of the least endowed improves their welfare, yet it also increases social competition, making those in the middle to be worse off—even if they have higher incomes as well. As social competition can be lowered by spreading agents apart in income space, we find that an increase in incomes for all, augmented by (weakly) increased income dispersion, constitutes a sufficient condition for Pareto-improvement. We also show that one can have an increase both in income and relative position but still be worse off.     

Inequality and income: The mediating effects of social spending and risk

This paper estimates models of social spending, income risk, and per capita income levels using data from a post-war panel of OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development) countries. The objective is to test two theories about the pathway from inequality to per capita income. According to one theory, inequality reduces incomes because it induces social spending, which acts as a drag on the economy. The results here suggest, however, that inequality does not seem to induce social spending, and social spending does not seem to lower per capita incomes. According to a second theory, inequality causes upheaval which adds to the volatility of per capita income, which may reduce the level of per capita income. The results suggest, however, that volatility, measured here as the standard deviation of per capita income, has little measurable impact on either per capita income or social spending. The mainsprings of per capita income are more likely to be the traditional factors: the work force, human capital, and physical capital.
JEL classification: E6.     

INEQUALITY COMPARISONS IN A MULTI‐PERIOD FRAMEWORK: THE ROLE OF ALTERNATIVE WELFARE METRICS

This paper considers the use of alternative welfare metrics in evaluations of income inequality in a multi‐period context. Using Norwegian longitudinal income data, it is found, as in many studies, that inequality is lower when each individual's annual average income is used as welfare metric, compared with the use of a single‐period accounting framework. However, this result does not necessarily hold when aversion to income fluctuations is introduced. Furthermore, when actual incomes are replaced by expected incomes (conditional on an initial period), using a model of income dynamics, higher values of inequality over longer periods are typically found, although comparisons depend on inequality and variability aversion parameters. The results are strongly influenced by the observed high degree of systematic regression toward the (geometric) mean, combined with a large extent of individual unexpected effects.     

中国收入差距与社会稳定问题的博弈分析

运用博弈理论分析中国收入差距与社会稳定问题有一定意义。在具有公平因素偏好的效用函数基础上分析社会低收入阶层决策对收入差距敏感程度的影响;在重复博弈中引入不同策略收益的增长率,分析社会低收入阶层在三阶段动态博弈中采取偏离子博弈完美均衡的非理性斗争策略的具体条件:其取决于收入差距敏感程度、自身收入的增长(变化)率和各社会阶层采取不同策略的预期收益等因素。     

STASIS AMID CHANGE INCOME INEQUALITY IN CANADA 1965-1983

Income inequality in Canada has not changed significantly over the past two decades, though this apparent stability may be surprising in view of the major economic and social changes that occurred over this period. The share of income going to the bottom quintile remains at about four percent while the top quintile continues to receive about 40 percent of income.
Social trends such as lower fertility rates have coincided with increased female labour force participation to increase family incomes in the middle and upper-middle parts of the income spectrum. At the same time, the trend for baby boom children to establish their own separate households, and increased divorce and separation rates, have tended to create more small family units with low incomes. These social trends, in isolation of other factors, would have increased income inequality.
However, economic factors have apparently offset these tendencies. Since employment income is concentrated in the middle and upper-middle ranges, the relative fall in this source of income over the past two decades tended to be equalizing. Similarly, the fact that a large part of total investment income accrues to the elderly who have below average income implies that the trend towards high interest rates has been equalizing. Finally, the social "safety nets" put in place in the mid-1960s and early 1970s have grown in relative importance, and this too has had an equalizing impact on the distribution of income.
Given the overall stability in income inequality, the equalizing tendencies of economic factors such as high interest rates and relatively slow economic growth, with the large automatic responsiveness of governments' social safety net programs, appear to have just about exactly offset the disequalizing social factors of "baby boomers" leaving home, lower fertility, higher divorce and separation rates, and higher female labour force participation.     

The myth of post-reform income stagnation: Evidence from Brazil and Mexico

Economic policies are often judged by a handful of statistics, some of which may be biased during periods of change. We estimate the income growth implied by the evolution of food demand and durable good ownership in post-reform Brazil and Mexico, and find that changes in consumption patterns are inconsistent with official estimates of near stagnant incomes. That is attributed to biases in the price deflator. The estimated unmeasured income gains are higher for poorer households, implying marked reductions in “real” inequality. These findings challenge the conventional wisdom that post-reform income growth was low and did not benefit the poor.     

Growth,mobility and social progress

We evaluate social progress on the basis of panel data on individual incomes by comparing the value of social welfare in the observed panel data to its value in a situation where individuals receive their first period income in each period. We derive necessary conditions for the welfare gain to be positive, and show how it can be decomposed in an effect of economic growth, a mobility effect and a cost due to aversion to time fluctuations given individuals’ ranks in the income distribution. The mobility effect, generated by reranking in the income distribution has two components: a cost due to time fluctuations in incomes and a benefit, due to equalization in time averaged incomes. We illustrate the analysis using CNEF data for Australia, Korea, Germany, Russia, Switzerland and the US. Our results indicate that the largest component of social progress is the equalization of time averaged income, induced by reranking. In countries with high growth (Australia, Korea and Russia), the growth effect is larger than the mobility effect, but in countries with low growth (Germany, Switzerland and the US), the opposite holds true. The poor performance of the US is explained by the large costs of income fluctuations and the way economic growth is distributed.     

Decomposing World Income Distribution: Does The World Have A Middle Class?

Using the national income/expenditure distribution data from 111 countries, we decompose total inequality between the individuals in the world, by continents and regions. We use Yitzhaki's Gini decomposition which allows for an exact breakdown of the Gini. We find that Asia is the most heterogeneous continent; between-country inequality is much more important than inequality in incomes within countries. At the other extreme is Latin America where differences between the countries are small, but inequalities within the countries are large. Western Europe/North America is fairly homogeneous both in terms of countries' mean incomes and income differences between individuals. If we divide the world population into three groups: the rich (those with incomes greater than Italy's mean income), the poor (those with incomes less than Western countries' poverty line), and the middle class, we find that there are only 11 percent of people who are "world middle class"; 78 percent are poor, and 11 percent are rich.     

Investment subsidies and redistributive capital income taxation in a neoclassical growth model

How do investment subsidies bear on pure redistribution when coupled with capital income taxes? In a heterogeneous agent, neoclassical growth framework it is found that on impact, with no optimizing behavior, investment subsidies are good for growth but bad for redistribution. The opposite holds for capital income taxes. But when the government acts as a Stackelberg leader vis-à-vis the private sector (the follower), the optimal feedback policy is by construction time-consistent and implies that in a long-run optimum the tax scheme does not distort accumulation. This holds regardless of social preferences. For the feedback Stackelberg equilibrium I find that (pure) redistribution can go either way and capital income taxes are nonzero in the long-run, time-consistent optimum, depending on the social weight of those who receive redistributive transfers, the distribution of pretax factor incomes, and the intertemporal elasticity of substitution. It is argued that investment subsidies may be an important indirect tool for redistribution, and may allow for the separation of “efficiency” and “equity” concerns.     

Perspectives on Australian Retirement Incomes

With important developments over the past two decades in Australian retirement income policy, projected future outcomes—for the public purse, for the national economy and for the future retired—have received considerable attention. This focus on the future should not, however, cause us to lose sight of the present. While the major changes in retirement income policy outcomes will not occur for some decades, the picture for current and recent cohorts of retired people is not static. This article begins with an account of the important policy developments since the 1980s in the Australian retirement income arena—the Australian retirement income system still differs radically from that in most other countries, in relying heavily on a means‐tested income maintenance system, rather than on social insurance. The outcomes for current and recent cohorts of retired people are then examined from two perspectives. The first perspective is an examination of the incomes of the aged in the mid 1990s and of trends over the 1980s and 1990s—including consideration of changes in the level, composition and distribution of aged incomes. The second perspective is an international comparison of the incomes of the aged.     

行业收入差距的经济学解释

文章通过统计数据验证了我国行业收入的绝对差距逐渐扩大,相对差距持续高位的现实,并运用经济学的理论与分析方法论证了行业收入差距的产生与发展机理。首先,垄断企业的高利润获得机制决定其在劳动力市场中的决策主体地位;其次,行业市场分割与拥挤效应再现了垄断行业高利润与低就业的利己目标与社会效应的矛盾;最后,垄断行业存在的大量的隐性工资收入,即福利津贴等准固定劳动力成本,更加放大了行业收入的差距状况,使得民众感受的行业收入差距大于数据中的体现。这部分隐藏的非公平的社会感知,是政府决策者在缓解收入差距、促进社会公平的制度建设中应该重点解决的问题。     

Bayesian estimation of social welfare and tax progressivity measures

This paper examines Bayesian methods of examining posterior distributions of inequality, concentration, tax progressivity and social welfare measures. Use is made of an explicit income distribution assumption and two alternative assumptions regarding the distribution of pre-tax mean incomes within each income group. The methods are applied to a simulated distribution of individual incomes and tax payments. It is possible to identify a minimum acceptable number of income classes to be used. The results suggest support for the use of group means in practical applications, particularly where large sample sizes are available. First version received: August 2000/Final version received: July 2001 RID="*" ID="*"  This research was supported by a Melbourne University Faculty of Economics and Commerce Research Grant. We should like to thank Bill Griffiths and two referees for comments on an earlier draft.     

ON THE ROLE OF CAPITAL GAINS IN SWEDISH INCOME INEQUALITY

Realized capital gains are typically disregarded in the study of income inequality. We show that in the case of Sweden this severely underestimates the actual increase in inequality and, in particular, top income shares during recent decades. Using micro panel data to average incomes over longer periods and re‐rank individuals according to income excluding capital gains, we show that capital gains indeed are a reoccurring addition to rather than a transitory component in top incomes. Doing the same for lower income groups, however, makes virtually no difference. We also try to find the roots of the recent surge in capital gains‐driven inequality in Sweden since the 1980s. While there are no evident changes in terms of who earns these gains (high wage earners vs. top capital income earners), the primary driver instead seems to be the drastic asset price increases on the post‐1980 deregulated financial markets.     

Social articulation as a condition for equitable growth

A formal model is developed to establish the structural conditions that result in growth being progressive or regressive on the personal distribution of income. These conditions include (1) intersectoral investment priorities between wage goods and luxuries, and (2) the state of the levels and distribution of incomes which determines the social origin of demand for different sectors of the economy. The particular combinations of investment and income structures that result in equalizing (social articulation) or unequalizing growth (social disarticulation) are derived. We show empirically that the structural conditions that allowed rapid but unequalizing growth in Brazil between 1968 and 1977 were those of social disarticulation.     

Education versus cash redistribution: The lifetime context

Education looks more powerful relative to cash redistribution when viewed in the context of lifetime rather than an annual income. The reason is that transitory income and family size affect the pattern of annual cash redistribution and both of them vary less across lifetimes than in individual years. Education may look even more powerful if the lifetime context is taken to include the period of childhood. For it is easier to target education to people whose childhood incomes are low than towards people whose adult incomes will be low. To analyse these issues one needs to compare the equalising power of a policy across income distributions that differ in their initial level of equality. We develop a method of doing this, using the Atkinson equality measure.     

不同来源收入对我国农村居民消费影响的区域差异分析

采用1995—2009年的面板数据,对我国东、中、西三大地区农村居民不同来源收入对其消费影响的区域差异进行了实证分析。结果表明:工资性收入和家庭经营性收入仍是影响我国农村居民消费的主要收入;财产性收入和转移性收入的影响不显著;三大地区农村居民的各种来源收入的边际消费倾向不同。最后提出,在提高农村居民收入水平的同时,应针对各地区不同来源收入的边际消费倾向的差异,制定能体现出区域差异性的农村居民消费政策。     

影响我国农村居民收入差距的主要因素:从收入构成角度的分解分析

This paper attempts to explore the causes behind the change of the inequality in China rural areas at the very beginning of this century by decomposing the inequality of the total per capita income into the contributions from different income components. Furthermore, we develop the decomposition method of Gini coefficients from the income components and use it not only in the static analysis but also in comparative static analysis. Namely it can be used to explore the change of the overall inequality by decomposing the change of Gini Coefficient from income components. The empirical results show that the wage from local employment, the income from agricultural household business and the incomes from non-agricultural household business are the three income components that made the largest contributions to the inequality of the total per capita income. The total contribution to the overall inequality of non-agricultural incomes was much more than that of agricultural incomes. The incomes from agricultural household business, the incomes from non-agricultural household business and the wages from migration made the positive impact on the increase of the overall inequality. The incomes donated by relatives and friends made the most important negative impact on the increase of the overall inequality.     

Interdependent welfare functions and optimal income distribution

The relationship between income distribution and social welfare is empirically analyzed, while explicitly allowing for the interdependence of individual welfare functions. The social welfare function is taken to be an additive function of individual welfare functions of income (WFIs). On the basis of Dutch data it is found that under certain conditions (such as absence of effects of income redistribution on productivity) an equal distribution of incomes is suboptimal. The interdependence of WFIs appears to have a pronounced effect on policy conclusions concerning the desirability of income redistribution vis-à-vis economic growth.