The unidimensional Pigou-Dalton transfer principle demands that a regressive transfer in income--a transfer from worse-off (poor) to better-off (rich)--decreases social welfare. In a multidimensional setting the direct link between income (or any other attribute) and individual well-being is...

The ethical view of prioritarianism holds the following: if an extra bundle of attributes is to be allocated to either of two individuals, then priority should be given to the worse off among the two. We consider multidimensional poverty comparisons with cardinal and ordinal attributes and...

Consider the following nine rules for adjudicating conflicting claims: the proportional, constrained equal awards, constrained equal losses, Talmud, Piniles’, constrained egalitarian, adjusted proportional, random arrival, and minimal overlap rules. For each pair of rules in this list, we...

We argue that normative indices of multidimensional inequality do not only measure a distribution’s extent of inequity (i.e., the gaps between the better-off and the worse-off), but also its extent of inefficiency (i.e., the non-realized mutually beneficial exchanges of goods). We provide a...

The Pigou-Dalton principle demands that a regressive transfer decreases social welfare. In the unidimensional setting this principle is consistent, because regressivity in terms of attribute amounts and regressivity in terms of individual well-being coincide in the case of a single attribute. In...

Different social planners may have different opinions on the well-being of individuals under different social options (Roberts, 1980). If utilities are translation- or ratio-scale measurable, or if the social ranking might be incomplete, or if interplanner comparability is allowed; then there...

We propose a criterion to rank poverty measures on the basis of distribution-sensitivity. The criterion compares reactions to ‘lossy’ transfers among the poor. We focus on the class of rank-dependent poverty measures and provide distribution-sensitivity rankings of the poverty gap ratio, the...

type="main" xml:id="ecca12059-abs-0001" <p>We study the evolution of population-weighted between-country inequality in the period 1980–2009. Whereas previous studies almost exclusively focused on relative inequality measures, we consider relative, absolute and intermediate versions of the Lorenz...</p>