Abstract: Rural households have been suspected to rely heavily on goods and services freely provided by environmental resources. However, there has been no adequate quantitative analysis of this issue due to a lack of appropriate household data sets encompassing economic and environmental data. We use a purpose-collected 213 household data set from rural Zimbabwe to investigate the impact of incorporating this missing source of household welfare on quantitative analysis of the measurement and causes of rural poverty and inequality. Incorporating environmental income in the household accounts results in dramatic and significant reductions in measured poverty, 50 percent or more over income as conventionally measured. Environmental income is also strongly and significantly equalising, bringing about roughly a 30 percent reduction in measured inequality. So access to commons resources has a substantial impact on poverty and inequality. However, including the value of environmental utilisations leaves analysis of the causes of rural differentiation unchanged: these resources do not alleviate the poverty trap.

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.

While standard political economy theories suggest a moderating effect of democratization on income inequality, empirical literature has failed to uncover any such robust relationship. Here we take yet another look at this issue arguing first, that prevailing ideology may be an important determinant of inequality and, second, that the democratization effect "works through" ideology. In societies where equality is highly valued there is less of a distributional conflict across income groups, hence democratization may have only a negligible effect on inequality. On the other hand, in societies where equality is not valued as much, democratization reduces inequality through redistribution as the poor outvote the rich. Our cross-country empirical analysis, covering the period 1960-98 and 126 countries, confirms the hypothesis: ideology -- as proxied by a country's dominant religion -- seems to be related to inequality. But, in addition, in Judeo-Christian societies increased democratization appears to lead to lower inequality, while in Muslim and Confucian societies democratization has only an insignificant effect on inequality. We hypothesize that in the latter group of countries, desired level of inequality is reached through informal transfers, while in Judeo-Christian societies where family ties are weaker, desired outcome is achieved by political action.

The constrained egalitarian solution of Dutta and Ray (1989) for TU-games is extended to asymmetric cases, using the notion of weight systems as in Kalai and Samet (1987, 1988). This weighted constrained egalitarian solution is based on the weighted Lorenz-criterion as an inequality measure. It is shown that in general there is at most one such weighted egalitarian solution for TU-games. Existence is proved for the class of convex games. Furthermore, the core of a postive valued convex game is covered by weighted constrained egalitarian solutions.

towards immigration:

Gent. We also thank Guillermo Cruces for computational assistance. Distributional Analysis Research Programme

for individual or collaborative research projects (grants awarded for periods of 2-12 weeks) What is IRISS-C/I? IRISS-C/I is a project funded by the European Commission in its ‘Access to Major Research Infrastructures ’ programme. IRISS-C/I funds short visits at CEPS/Instead for researchers willing to undertake collaborative and/or internationally comparative research in economics and other social sciences. Who may apply? We encourage applications from all interested individuals (doing non-proprietary research in a European institution) who want to carry out their research in the fields of expertise of CEPS/Instead. What is offered by IRISS-C/I? Free access to the IRISS-C/I research infrastructure (office, computer, library…); access to the CEPS/Instead archive of micro-data (including e.g. the ECHP); technical and scientific assistance; free accommodation and a contribution towards travel and subsistence costs. Research areas Survey and panel data methodology; income and poverty dynamics; gender, ethnic and social inequality; unemployment; segmentation of labour markets; education and training; social protection and redistributive policies; impact of ageing populations; intergenerational relations; regional development and structural change. Additional information and application form IRISS-C/I

A large body of literature is devoted to the measurement of income inequality, yet little attention is given to the question, Why measure inequality? However, the reasons for measurement bear importantly on whether and how measurement should be done. Upon examination, normative measures are found to be of questionable value. Descriptive measures, by contrast, may be useful, but the appropriate measure depends on the field of application rather than on general, a priori principles of the sort that are emphasized in the existing measurement literature. Measures of poverty are also considered, and similar conclusions are reached.

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.

During the past four decades both between and within group wage inequality increased significantly in the US. I provide a microfounded justification for this pattern, by introducing private employer learning in a model of signaling with credit constraints. In particular, I show that when financial constraints relax, talented individuals can acquire education and leave the uneducated pool, this decreases unskilledinexperienced wages and boosts wage inequality. This explanation is consistent with US data from 1970 to 1997, indicating that the rise of the skill and the experience premium coincides with a fall in unskilled-inexperienced wages, while at the same time skilled or experienced wages remain constant. The model accounts for: (i) the increase in the skill premium despite the growing supply of skills; (ii) the understudied aspect of rising inequality related to the increase in the experience premium; (iii) the sharp growth of the skill premium for inexperienced workers and its moderate expansion for the experienced ones; (iv) the puzzling coexistence of increasing experience premium within the group of unskilled workers and its flat pattern among the skilled ones. The