Inequality Comparisons When the Populations Differ in Size

This paper considers the problem of comparing two income distributions with different numbers of income recipients. The approach eschews the quot;replication of populationsquot; of Dalton's Population Principle, which has been a fixture of the literature on income inequality since its inception. We start from a preorder which is a generalization of majorization, construct the quot;better-thanquot; set and characterize the order-preserving welfare functions in a unfied framework. The fixed population case falls off as a particular case