Economic development should be conceived of as the degree to which an economy has implemented an efficient and just distribution of economic resources. The ubiquitous measure of GDP per capita reflects a utilitarian conception of justice, where individual utility is defined as personal income,...

This chapter reviews definitional issues that arise in assessing the extent of, and change in, poverty in western industrialized countries, including the choice of resource, level of poverty line and appropriate adjustments for the size and type of the income-sharing unit. The chapter also...

This report looks at the extent to which household net worth and disposable income are correlated across individuals. After having briefly discussed the importance of better information on household wealth for social policies, the paper describes the main features of the Luxembourg Wealth Study...

This study uses an extraordinary Swedish data set to explore the sources of the intergenerational transmission of socioeconomic status. Merging data from administrative sources and censuses, we investigate the association between sons' and daughters' socioeconomic outcomes and those of their...

The effects of unemployment and inflation on quintile shares of family income in the United States are estimated by means of generalized least squares. Inflation is found to have a significant progressive impact on the distribution of income. The results also lend support to earlier findings...