The distributional incidence of growth: a non-anonymous and rank dependent 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 complete and partial dominance conditions over di¤erent 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.