This paper examines the measurement of social welfare, poverty and inequality taking into account reference … differences between standard poverty and inequality measures based on observed income and measures that are calculated based on … equivalent income. These differences are illustrated using household-level panel data from Russia and Vietnam. …

This paper revisits the fiscal decentralization theorem, by relaxing the role of the assumption that governments are …) centralization can welfare-dominate decentralization even if there are no externalities and regions are heterogenous; (ii …) decentralization can welfare-dominate centralization even if there are positive externalities and regions are homogenous. The intuition …