The study focuses on the quality of live disparities among Hungarian micro-regions as well as among counties. For measuring quality of life HDI was chosen as the index to work with. The analysis focused on three years (1994, 2001 and 2005), which makes it possible to examine the temporal change...

Our goal is to analyse the inequality aspects of Human Development Index and to propose a new aggregation function that can adjust it by considering inequality penalisation. We take into account inequality across dimensions and across individuals and three laws of inequality penalisation:...

Economic development is a subject that generates much controversy, mainly because of the widening gaps between poor and rich nations. In the present paper, we intend to identify and explain the differences that exist both between and within the European Union states, from an economic development...

In the context of EU enlargement there is no universal model which should offer a unique solution for diminishing the disparities in the development of a country. An approach only from the point of view of economic growth is not enough, so we extend the analysis towards the social development....

We argue against the use of composite indices, such as the Human Development Index (HDI), in economic history. We show that the HDI can be interpreted as a formal representation of the analyst's ethical system. We support our claim by introducing a new class of paternalistic social welfare...

This paper investigates how rural-urban income differentials interact with the risk coping motive to shape households' migration behavior. Using a model of migration behavior under agricultural income risk, our theoretical results suggest that while income differentials remain crucial in...

In this paper we apply two statistical models to the measurement of polarization to Israeli income data over the past decade in order to empirically detect income classes as sub-populations of incomes concentrated around an optimal number of poles. The statistical models compared are a...

In this paper we study income polarization by first comparing the efficiency of two statistical models to identify the number of poles in the income distribution empirically. The statistical models used are a multi-resolution analysis (MRA) and a log-normal approach (LNA). We then apply the...

The evidence on the impact of return migration on the sending country is rather sparse, though growing. The contribution of this paper is in addressing various selectivity problems whilst quantifying the impact of return migration on wages of returnees using non-experimental data. Using Egyptian...

We model how the remittances by a migrant are influenced by the remittance behavior of fellow migrants with whom the migrant compares himself. We show that an increase in the mean remittances of the group of fellow migrants encourages the migrant to increase his own remittances, and that this...