A New Approach to Estimating Engel Elasticities from Concentration Curves.

A new procedure is proposed for estimating Engel elasticities using the Lorenz/concentration curve approach. The method is an extension of works by N. C. Kakwani and S. Yitzhaki. However, the proposed procedure is more flexible in permitting the estimation of standard errors through the usual Taylor expansion, which is not possible with Kakwani's method. For illustration, some empirical results using Australian unit record household expenditure data are presented. Copyright 1994 by Royal Economic Society.