Using data from the China Statistical Yearbook, trends in income inequality for urban and rural China are studied. According to our estimates, the overall Gini for China increased from 1980/81 to 2008. The rural Gini increased at an exponential rate of 1.2% while the urban Gini rose at a rate of...

The Social Welfare Function (SWF) is a decision rule to rank alternative social states in a complete fashion in terms of social welfare. This paper questions the philosophy of Paretian Principle as a desirable property of the SWF. It shows that it is possible to generalize the widely used Sen...