1,721,024 research outputs found
LIFE SATISFACTION AND INCOME INEQUALITY
No full textDo people care about income inequality and does income inequality affect subjective well-being? Welfare theories can predict either a positive or a negative impact of income inequality on subjective well-being and empirical research has found evidence of a positive, negative, or non-significant relation. This paper attempts to determine some of the possible causes of such empirical heterogeneity. Using a very large sample of world citizens we test the consistency of the effect of income inequality in predicting life satisfaction. We find that income inequality has a negative and significant effect on life satisfaction. This result is robust to changes of regressors and estimation choices and also persists across different income groups and across different types of countries. However, this relation is easily obscured or reversed by multicollinearity generated by the use of country and year fixed effects. This is particularly true if the number of data points for inequality is small, which is a common feature of cross-country or longitudinal studies. © 2010 The Author. Review of Income and Wealth © 2010 International Association for Research in Income and Wealth
The choice of the working sector in transition: Income and non-income determinants of sector participation in Kazakhstan
No full textThis study compares the individual, household and location characteristics of private employees, the self-employed, the unemployed and the economically inactive in Kazakhstan making use of a 1996 World Bank Living Standards Measurement Survey. The purpose is to understand whether the process of transition has determined a selection of workers exiting the state sector and entering the three relatively new pools of private employees, self-employed and unemployed. An occupational choice model is used to explore the determinants of sector participation. It is found that income opportunities are similar between the private and self-employment sectors, that the private sector is not necessarily the workers first choice and that non-income determinants including local economic and labour market conditions and household related factors explain better than income the choice of the working sector. Self-employment seems to be a key sector in understanding the mechanisms of sector choice and the reallocation of labour. Unemployment appears as a choice of last resort and made by truly rationed individuals. © The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, 2000
Two classes of generalized deprivation indexes
No full textThe paper uses two particular formulations of the Gini index to derive two different relative deprivation measures. We then generalize the formulation of these measures following Donaldson and Weymark (1980) and Berrebi and Silber (1985) and show how these generalizations can be considered as two different classes of indexes. An example illustrates how the use of the two classes of indexes can lead to different results in empirical applications
Relative deprivation and satisfaction: Empirical findings
No full textThis chapter provides a review of the empirical literature that attempted to test the relative income and relative deprivation hypotheses in economics. The relative income and relative deprivation hypotheses are treated as one and the same hypothesis
Relative labour deprivation and urban migration in Turkey
No full textThe paper develops a concept, a measure and an index of relative labour deprivation and applies these tools to measure deprivation in urban areas of South-East Turkey. It is shown how a Yitzhaki-type of relative deprivation index can be applied to the labor domain and be extended to take into account the notion of reference group derived from modern theories of social justice. In the absence of panel or longitudinal data, such measure results particularly useful to derive policy recommendations for areas characterized by heterogeneous communities. Contrary to what conventional statistics and wisdom would suggest, we find migrants from Eastern Turkey to be less relatively labour deprived than other groups of migrants. © 2009 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC
Macroeconomic policies and social unrest in Uzbekistan
No full textWhat is the connection between the events of May 13, 2005 in Andijon and the key macroeconomic policies pursued by the Uzbek government between 1998 and 2004? Drawing on materials produced by international financial institutions and a think tank in Tashkent, an economist examines the Uzbek government's economic strategies and the attitudes of international financial institutions (IFIs) operating in Uzbekistan toward those policies. The larger issue of the nature of the IFIs' responsibility for implementation and outcomes is considered. Copyright © 2006 by V. H. Winston & Son, Inc. All rights reserved
Stochastic dominance, poverty and the treatment effect curve
No full textThe paper proposes a simple framework for the evaluation of anti-poverty programs based on single means differences, FGT poverty measures and stochastic dominance theory. A Treatment Effect Curve (TEC) is derived and its use illustrated with simulated data
Population Changes and the Measurement of Inequality
No full textPopulation changes in countries with little natural growth tend to occur via migration channels and among poorer individuals such as refugees and economic migrants, or richer individuals such as international white collar workers or global entrepreneurs. These migratory flows are increasing in size, they are difficult to capture in censuses and surveys, and they potentially bias the measurement of inequality. This paper provides a formal treatment of the impact of population changes on the measurement of inequality when changes occur to the extremes of an income distribution. It provides the conditions under which inequality is expected to increase or decrease and determines the relative importance of including or excluding selected observations at the top or at the bottom. An application to US data illustrates the mathematical results and shows that including or excluding observations from the extremes can bias the measurement of inequality significantly
Happiness, deprivation and the alter ego
No full textThe paper focuses on satisfaction with income and proposes a utility model built on two value systems, the ‘Ego’ system - described as one’s own income assessment relatively to one’s own past and future income - and the ‘Alter’ system - described as one’s own income assessment relatively to a reference group. We show how the union of these two value systems and the use of relative deprivation measures can lead to a model able to accom- modate a wide range of theories on income and happiness. The model is then tested using the Consortium of Household Panels for European Socio- economic Research (CHER), a collection of 19 panel surveys including over 1.2 m. individual observations. We find absolute income to sit at the in- tersection between the ‘Ego’ and the ‘Alter’ systems and to play the most prominent role in explaining satisfaction with income. Relative deprivation is also found to be important for understanding the income-happiness nexus while we find income expectations to be less relevant once we control for absolute income. Overall, the ‘Alter’ system (the cross-section comparison with others) seems to be more relevant in valuing income than the ‘Ego’ system (the longitudinal self-comparison of income)
Poverty measurement for forcibly displaced populations: Challenges and prospects of a new field
No full textPoverty measurement among Forcibly Displaced Populations (FDPs) including refugees and Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) has been, for long, neglected by the economics profession and by poverty specialists working across the social sciences. This has changed since the beginning of the Syrian Conflict in 2011 and the peak of the European migration crisis in 2015. This paper reviews the evolution, current status and future prospects of the poverty measurement literature for FDPs, discusses the main data and measurement challenges associated with this type of populations. It also provides an overview of the substantial effort that humanitarian and development organizations are currently undertaking to close this historical gap in poverty measurement
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