We show how to minimize the probability of misclassifying individuals as being poor or not poor when data on some of their relevant attributes are missing, but an estimate of the population distribution of attributes is available.

Answers of sample survey respondents to questions like the following one: "In the circumstances of your household, what income would you regard as the minimum (or good/bad/sufficient, etc.) for your household?" can be used to estimate equivalence scales. It is sometimes claimed that this is a...

Los cambios experimentados por la sociedad española en las últimas décadas pueden haber modificado la distribución de la renta y el perfil de pobreza en nuestro país. El presente trabajo tiene como principal objetivo retomar el análisis de los factores socioeconómicos que determinan las...

In recent years, policymaking in China has put increasing emphasis on stemming the growth in inequality, which had been fairly steep since the 1980s. Policy action has taken the form of regional development measures and of reforms of various aspects of the social safety net broadly defined. The...

People who are unable to maintain the same standard of living as others around them experience a sense of relative deprivation that has been shown to reduce feelings of well-being. Relative deprivation reflects conditions of worsening relative poverty despite striking reductions in absolute...

Estimating the impact of the crisis on income distribution requires up-to-date information. Due to the complexity of income surveys such as EU-SILC, income data usually become available with considerable delay. In this context, micro-simulation models are an appropriate and widely used...

This paper describes how household wealth is distributed in 28 OECD countries, based on evidence from the second wave of the OECD Wealth Distribution Database. A number of general patterns emerge from these data. First, wealth concentration is twice the level of income inequality: across the 28...

Aphorisms that “rising tides raise all boats” or that material advances of the rich eventually “trickle down” to the poor are really maxims regarding the nature of stochastic processes that underlay the income/wellbeing paths of groups of individuals. This paper looks at the implications...

Die Energiewende umfasst neben dem Ausstieg aus der Atomenergie unter anderem auch den Ausbau erneuerbarer Energien, die Steigerung der Energieeffizienz und die Senkung des Treibhausgasausstoßes. Dabei wird viel Geld bewegt und es stellt sich immer dringender die Frage nach der sozialen...

Despite the formal rigour that attends social and economic measurement, the substantive meaning of particular measures could be compromised in the absence of a clear and coherent conceptualization of the phenomenon being measured. A case in point is afforded by the status of a "focus-axiom" in...