We show that the weak Pareto law, as used to characterize the tail behaviour of income distributions, implies regularly varying tail probabilities, but that the reverse implication does not hold. We also establish implications among other versions of the weak Pareto law.

Suppose are independent subexponential random variables with partial sums. We show that if the pairwise sums of the ’s are subexponential, then is subexponential and . The result is applied to give conditions under which as , where are constants such that is a.s. convergent. Asymptotic tail...