Fewer than 50% of British employees now have their pay and conditions affected by collective pay setting institutions - collective bargaining or wage councils. This paper provides an historical context to the current picture of a decollectivised Britain, constructing a time series on coverage...

Inequality measures are often used to summarise information about empirical income distributions. However , the resulting picture of the distribution and of the changes in the distribution can be severely distorted if the data are contaminated. The nature of this distortion will in general...

We examine the implications of three similar criteria that are commonly used in welfare economics and the analysis of inequality and poverty - income dominance, monotonicity and the Pareto principle - within the context of income-distribution comparisons. We show that whilst there is a simple...

The second-order stochastic dominance criterion for inequality analysis introduced by Atkinson (1970) covers nearly all well-known inequality indices. The same cannot be said, in respect of poverty indices, for the second-order stochastic dominance criterion for poverty analysis introduced by...

Statistical problems in modelling personal income distributions include estimation procedures, testing and model choice. Typically, the parameters of a given model are estimated by classical procedures such as maximum likelihood and least squares estimators. Unfortunately, the classical methods...

Under which circumstances do oligopolists have an incentive to share private information about a stochastic demand or stochastic costs? We present a general model which includes virtually all models of the existing literature on information sharing as special cases. The analysis reveals that in...

The paper uses data from the annual British General household Survey to examine changes in the structure of weekly earnings for full-time male employees aged 16 to 64 during the period 1974-1988. The principal findings are: (1) earnings inequality fell slightly in the second half of the 1970s...

China's thirteen years of economic reforms (1979-1991) have achieved an average GNP annual growth rate of 8.6%. What makes China's reforms differ from those of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union is the sustained entry and expansion of the non-state sector. We argue that the organization...

Much of the excitement around the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) has been generated by anticipations of a strongly foreign investment response. Nevertheless, the plethora of applied papers about the NAFTA have all either ignored DFI or kept it exogenous. In this paper we provide...

The decision to move to a market economy sets in train two major forces. 1. The fall in output has led to a reduction in personal incomes and created a fiscal crisis. 2. A widening earnings and income distribution is a result of wage and price liberalisation, and is an inherent part of the...