Interest in economic mobility stems largely from its perceived role as an equalizer of opportunities, though not necessarily of outcomes. In this paper we show that this view leads very naturally to a methodology for the measurement of social mobility which has strong parallels with the theory of progressive taxation. We characterize opportunity–equalizing mobility processes, and provide simple criteria to determine when one process is more equalizing than another. We then explain how this mobility ordering relates to social welfare analysis, and how it di¤ers from existing ones. We also extend standard indices of tax progressivity to mobility processes, and illustrate our general methodology on intra- and intergenerational mobility data from the United States and Italy.

Measures for sparse best–basis selection are analyzed and shown to fit into a general framework based on majorization, Schur-concavity, and concavity. This framework facilitates the analysis of algorithm performance and clarifies the relationships between existing proposed concentration measures useful for sparse basis selection. It also allows one to define new concentration measures, and several general classes of measures are proposed and analyzed in this paper. Admissible measures are given by the Schur-concave functions, which are the class of functions consistent with the so-called Lorentz ordering (a partial ordering on vectors also known as majorization). In particular, concave functions form an important subclass of the Schur-concave functions which attain their minima at sparse solutions to the best basis selection problem. A general affine scaling optimization algorithm obtained from a special factorization of the gradient function is developed and proved to converge to a sparse solution for measures chosen from within this subclass.

this paper are entirely those of the authors. They do not necessarily represent the view of the World Bank, its Executive Directors, or the countries they represent. Policy Research Working Papers are available online at http://econ.worldbank.org. *The author is grateful to Kalpana Mehra for superb computer assistance. Research for this paper was financed by a special grant from "The Poverty, Inequality, and Socioeconomic Performance Thematic Group" at the World Bank. Summary This paper uses household- level data from a nationally-representative survey to analyze the impact of nonfarm income on income inequality in rural Egypt. After pinpointing the importance of nonfarm income to the rural poor, the paper decomposes total rural income among five sources of income: nonfarm, agricultural, livestock, rental and transfer. This decomposition shows that while nonfarm income represents the most important inequality-decreasing source of income, agricultural income represents the most important inequality- increasing source of income. While a 1 percent marginal increase in nonfarm income will cause the Gini coefficient of overall income to fall by 12.8 percent, a 1 percent marginal increase in agricultural income will cause the Gini coefficient to rise by 15.8 percent. The reason for this difference has to do with land, which is distributed very unevenly in this study. Regression analysis of the determinants of income shows that while land ownership is positively and statistically related to the receipt of agricultural income, it has no statistical relationship to the receipt of nonfarm income. In the past many researchers and policymakers have viewed the rural economy of developing countries as being synonymous with agriculture. According to this view, rural households receive...

for continuous guidance and wise advice throughout the course of the dissertation, as well as for teaching me to write. I wish to thank Scott Page for his numerous insightful comments and assistance during the course of the dissertation. I thank Mike Alvarez and Rod Kiewiet for their comments and assistance during the course of the dissertation. I also thank Gary King, Daniel Lowenstein and Ken McCue for their comments on individual chapters. Redistricting is always political, increasingly controversial, and often ugly. Politicians have always fought tooth-and-nail over district lines, while the courts, for most of their history, considered the subject a thicket too political even to enter. Three decades ago the courts finally entered the political thicket, ruling in Baker v. Carr (1962) that redistricting was justiciable. A decade ago, the court showed signs that it wanted to chop the thicket down, ruling in Davis v. Bandemer (1986) that partisan gerrymanders were actionable. But, in fact, few suits followed this potentially

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This paper examines the direct, first-rounds impact of two types of remittances---internal and external remittances---on income distribution and asset accumulation in rural Pakistan. Using income decomposition techniques on a threeyear panel household data set, the paper finds that internal remittances have a positive effect on equity and that external remittances have a negative effect. The study also uses an asset-accumulation model to pinpoint the effect of remittances on five types of rural assets: irrigated land owned, rainfed land owned, livestock assets, agricultural capital, and nonfarm assets. The results show that remittances do have an effect on rural asset accumulation. While external remittances have a positive and significant effect on the accumulation of land, internal remittances have a positive and significant effect on the accumulation of agricultural capital. CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS..............................................v 1. INTRODUCTION.......................

This paper uses income decomposition techniques to demonstrate the importance of livestock income in improving rural income distribution. It is based on three-year household panel data (1986 to 1989) from rural Pakistan. The paper first decomposes total income among five sources: agricultural, nonfarm, livestock, rental and transfer. This shows that livestock income is inequality-decreasing and that it makes the smallest contribution to overall inequality. The study then decomposes the sources of livestock inequality by type of animal. While livestock income from male animals has a negative impact on equity, livestock income from one female animal (local cow) has a positive effect. CONTENTS Acknowledgments ....................................................v 1.

The Centre for Market and Public Organisation (CMPO) is a leading research centre, combining expertise in economics, geography and law. Our objective is to study the intersection between the public and private sectors of the economy, and in particular to understand the right way to organise and deliver public services. The Centre aims to develop research, contribute to the public debate and inform policy-making. CMPO, now an ESRC Research Centre was established in 1998 with two large grants from The Leverhulme Trust. In 2004 we were awarded ESRC Research Centre status, and CMPO now combines core funding from both the ESRC and the

Over the past decades, child malnutrition in Ethiopia has persisted at alarmingly high rates. By applying the conditional nutrition demand approach to household data from three consecutive welfare monitoring surveys over the period 1996-1998, this study identifies household resources, parental education, food prices and maternal nutritional knowledge as key determinants of growth faltering in Ethiopia. Income growth is important for alleviating child stunting, though on its own it will not suffice to reach the international goal of halving each country's level of child malnutrition by 2020. Universalizing access to primary schooling for girls has slightly more promise. However, to reduce child growth faltering in Ethiopia in a significant – and timely-manner, our empirical results indicate that targeted child growth monitoring and maternal nutrition education programs will be needed in conjunction with efforts to promote private income growth and formal schooling.

This essay aims at a broad, main-stream account of the literature on inequality and poverty measurement in the space of income and, additionally, deals with measures of disparity and deprivation in the more expanded domain of capabilities and functionings. In addition to an introductory and a concluding part, the paper has four sections. The first of these, on measurement of income inequality, deals with preliminary concepts and definitions; a visual representation of inequality (the Lorenz curve); real-valued indices of inequality; properties of inequality indices; some specific inequality measures; and the relationship between Lorenz, welfare, and inequality orderings. The second section, on poverty, deals with the identification and aggregation exercises; properties of poverty indices; some specific poverty measures; the problem of plurality and unambiguous rankings; poverty measures and anti-poverty policy; and other issues in the measurement of poverty. The third section considers aspects of both congruence and conflict in the relationship amongst poverty, inequality, and welfare. The final substantive section advances the rationale for a more comprehensive assessment of human wellbeing than is afforded by the income perspective, it briefly reviews measurement concerns relating to generalized indices of deprivation and disparity, and it discusses the data and policy implications of the more expansive view of well-being adopted in the section.