Search

In this paper, we study the evolution of socioeconomic inequalities in child malnutrition in Egypt between 2000 and 2014. Unlike most of the literature, we go beyond the usual dichotomous framework of stunting incidence and adopt a continuous indicator approach of child stunting. We use Wagstaff (J Health Econ 21:627–641, 2002) health achievement index to measure health shortfall as indicator of the social impact of child stunting. In order to analyze the determinants of stunting shortfall, we derive the expression of the recentered influence function of the health shortfall index. We also use this result in a recentered influence function regression framework and perform a Oxaca–Blinder type of decomposition of the change in stunting shortfall during that period. We find that stunting shortfall did not change significantly during that period. However, the Oxaca–Blinder decomposition indicates that the endowment effect would have decreased significantly stunting shortfall between 2000 and 2014. Unfortunately, the adverse economic conditions implied a structural effect in the opposite direction.

This paper introduces a new graphical tool: the mean deviation concentration curve. Using a unified approach, we derive the associated dominance conditions that identify robust rankings of absolute socioeconomic health inequality for all indices obeying Bleichrodt and van Doorslaer's (J Health Econ 25:945-957, 2006) principle of income-related health transfer. We also derive dominance conditions that are compatible with other transfer principles available in the literature. To make the identification of all robust orderings implementable using survey data, we discuss statistical inference for these dominance tests. To illustrate the empirical relevance of the proposed approach, we compare joint distributions of income and health-related behavior in the United States.

In this paper, we use a positional dominance approach to assess the desirability of eliminating food subsidies in Lebanon. The analysis is based on aggregate information from the 2004 to 2005 National Survey of Households Living Conditions. We use this aggregate information on expenditure patterns to reconstructroughestimates ofs-concentration curves and efficiency-cost ratio sets. Evidences suggest that the Lebanese government should probably find other avenues to reduce the fiscal deficit.

When assessing socioeconomic health inequalities, researchers often draw upon measures of income inequality that were developed for ratio scale variables. As a result, the use of categorical data (such as self-reported health status) produces rankings that may be arbitrary and contingent to the numerical scale adopted. In this paper, we develop a method that overcomes this issue by providing conditions for which these rankings are invariant to the numerical scale chosen by the researcher. In doing so, we draw on the insight provided by Allison and Foster (2004) and extend their method to the dimension of socioeconomic inequality by exploiting the properties of rank-dependent indices such as Wagstaff (2002) achievement and extended concentration indices. We also provide an empirical illustration using the National Institute of Health Survey 2012.

Public transfer programs have a dual objective of redistributing income and providing insurance when individual incomes are subject to variability. To our knowledge, the normative literature on marginal policy reform has not yet provided a method to account for individual’s exposure to risk in the evaluation of public transfer programs. Stochastic dominance tests are proposed to identify robust marginal poverty-reducing transfer reforms in socially risky situations.

Although most of the measurement approaches in health inequality measurement assume the existence of a ratio-scale variable, most of the information on health available in population surveys is given in the form of categorical variables. This may result in the arbitrariness of the health concentration index's value. Makdissi and Yazbeck (2012) adopt a counting approach to overcome this problem. In this paper, we use this counting approach and decompose socioeconomic health inequality and achievement by categories of health problems and by region in the United States using the National Health Interview Survey 2010.

The health concentration curve is the standard graphical tool to depict socioeconomic health inequality in the literature on health inequality. This paper shows that testing for the absence of socioeconomic health inequality is equivalent to testing if the conditional expectation of health on income is a constant function that is equal to average health status. In consequence, any test for parametric specification of a regression function can be used to test for the absence of socioeconomic health inequality (subject to regularity conditions). Furthermore, this paper illustrates how to test for this equality using a test for parametric regression functional form and applies it to health-related behaviors from the National Health Survey 2014.

The objective of this article is to provide the analyst with the necessary tools that allow for a robust ordering of joint distributions of health and income. We contribute to the literature on the measurement and inference of socioeconomic health inequality in three distinct but complementary ways. First, we provide a formalization of the socioeconomic health inequality-specific ethical principle introduced by Erreygers et al. (2012) . Second, we propose new graphical tools and dominance tests for the identification of robust orderings of joint distributions of income and health associated with this new ethical principle. Finally, based on both pro-poor and pro-extreme ranks ethical principles we address a very important aspect of dominance literature: the inference. To illustrate the empirical relevance of the proposed approach, we compare joint distributions of income and a health-related behavior in the United States in 1997 and 2014.

Housing deprivation orderings raise challenges as far as measurement is concerned. The first challenge resides in the identification of an adequate variable that characterizes housing services consumed by households. Another challenge may arise in the comparisons of housing services consumption between households of different sizes and composition. The last challenge may arise in the choice of a deprivation threshold and of a deprivation index. In this article we address those challenges theoretically. An empirical illustration is offered using Lebanese data.

Dans cet article, nous présentons une analyse de la pauvreté chez les 0-17 ans au Québec et au Canada dans une perspective comparative et une analyse des impacts des politiques publiques sur la pauvreté dans ce groupe d’âge. Nous montrons que la pauvreté chez ces personnes au Québec est moins élevée que partout ailleurs au Canada et que dans une perspective internationale, le classement du Québec et du Canada est relativement bon en ce qui a trait à la pauvreté des 0-17 ans. Nos résultats indiquent aussi que, si l’objectif du décideur public est de faire diminuer la pauvreté chez ces jeunes au Québec, une augmentation des prestations familiales et des prestations d’aide sociale serait l’option à privilégier., In this article, we present an analysis of poverty among 0-to-17-year-olds in Quebec and Canada from a comparative perspective and an analysis of the impact of public policies on poverty. We show that the poverty rate among 0-to-17-year-olds in Quebec is lower than elsewhere in Canada and that, from an international perspective, Quebec and Canada rank relatively well. Our results also indicate that, provided it is the objective of public decision-makers to decrease poverty among 0-to-17-year-olds in Quebec, an increase in family benefits and social assistance would be two measures to prioritize.

Policies that affect consumer and producer prices have an impact on welfare, and there are many such policies. Some governments maintain high import tariffs or fail to implement regulations to foster competition. This may protect national producers by maintaining high domestic producer prices, but it also raises consumption prices, which hurts consumers. Most governments use sales and indirect taxes to raise tax revenues, thus affecting consumer and producer prices. This is particularly important for developing countries, which rely heavily on commodity taxation to generate tax revenues. Price subsidies on food, education, energy and transportation are also common in developing and developed countries alike. Policy analysts must routinely evaluate the impact of such pricing policies on poverty and social welfare. Important information problems stand, however, in the way of anyone wishing to do this. The main objective of the article is to show how these problems can be (somewhat) circumscribed. We are particularly interested in demonstrating the empirical applicability of a “social improvement” approach. This approach makes it possible to identify marginal price changes that will be deemed socially desirable by wide spectra of social welfare and poverty analysts. The term “social improvement” thus encompasses both the classical welfaredominance and the poverty-dominance approaches. For expositional simplicity, we will focus in this article on the analysis of the social impact of indirect tax reforms. We will think of two goods, j and l, and will

When assessing socioeconomic health inequalities, researchers often draw upon measures of income inequality that were developed for ratio scale variables. As a result, the use of categorical data (such as self-reported health status) produces rankings that may be arbitrary and contingent to the numerical scale adopted. In this paper, we develop a method that overcomes this issue by providing conditions for which these rankings are invariant to the numerical scale chosen by the researcher. In doing so, we draw on the insight provided by Allison and Foster (2004) and extend their method to the dimension of socioeconomic inequality by exploiting the properties of rank-dependent indices such as Wagstaff (2002) achievement and extended concentration indices. We also provide an empirical illustration using the National Institute of Health Survey 2012.

This paper extends familiar results on the optimal pricing of publicly provided goods and price cap regulations in a stochastic dominance framework. The key advantage is that the assessment as to whether pricing or price cap reforms are poverty reducing or welfare improving is not contingent on any given social welfare function. Rather, robust assessments of the impact of reforms can be made for wide classes of ethical judgments.

This paper argues that health transfers from an individual at a lower rank in the health distribution to a person at a higher rank may decrease the concentration index if the former has a slightly higher income. The concentration index, being mainly focused on the socioeconomic dimension of health inequality, can produce such counter-intuitive results that overlooks the pure health inequality aversion of the planner. Building on Atkinson (1970), Yitzhaki (1983) and Wagstaff (2002), this paper presents a simple new class of health achievement and health inequality indices that overcomes the above mentioned problem.

Although sequential stochastic dominance techniques have been used in the literature to make comparisons of income poverty which are robust to the assumptions made about the economies of scale within households, the techniques could be applied to a much wider set of issues. In this paper, these techniques are applied to energy deprivation in Guatemala. Fuel poverty is compared among households with and without access to electricity, and it is assessed whether access to electricity for those who do not have access currently would eliminate the observed difference in fuel poverty between the two groups of households.

The poverty impact of indirect tax reforms is analyzed using sequential stochastic dominance methods. This allows agents to differ in dimensions that cannot always be precisely captured within the usual money-metric indicators of living standards. Examples of such dimensions include household size and composition, temporal or spatial variation in price indices, and individual needs and ``merits''.

The evaluation of the poverty impact and targeting performance of a given social program may depend on how other programs are treated in the analysis.Using well-known results from cooperative game theory, this paper proposes an empirically simple yet theoretically sound method for allocating between various programs the overall poverty reduction obtained from a set of programs, and for assessing the targeting performance of each program

L’objectif de cet article est d’identifier les classements de pauvreté au Canada qui sont robustes à un changement de méthodologie d’analyse. Pour ce faire, nous présentons en détail dans un premier temps, les définitions et la méthodologie d’analyse qui seront utilisées. Nous concluons que la pauvreté a augmenté au Canada entre 1989 et 1997, que les groupes démographiques les plus touchés par la pauvreté sont les familles monoparentales dirigées par des femmes et les célibataires. Finalement, nous obtenons un classement entre les régions du Canada, pour lequel il y a moins de pauvreté au Québec qu’en Ontario et qu’en Colombie-Britannique, et identifions les changements de méthodologie pour lesquelles cette conclusion demeure valide., The objective of this paper is to identify robust poverty orderings in Canada. We present in details the definitions and methodology used in the paper. We conclude that poverty in Canada has increased between 1989 and 1997, that lone parent mothers are the most vulnerable demographic group. Finally, we find that poverty is lower in Quebec than in Ontario and British Columbia.

Resume Dans cet article, on developpe un modele dans lequel l’embauche d’un travailleur sans experience comporte une caracteristique de bien public en revelant a posteriori a tous les employeurs la qualite de cet employe. On analyse les consequences macroeconomiques, en termes d’efficacite, du phenomene microeconomique que constitue l’appariement entre les travailleurs et leur emploi. Dans ce contexte, on demontre que l’embauche decentralisee de travailleurs sans experience est sous-optimale du point de vue du profit des firmes et qu’une politique d’emploi augmente le profit joint de ces dernieres et que, sous certaines conditions, permet de reduire le chomage. Une politique d’encouragement a l’embauche peut notamment etre realisee par une reduction des charges sociales pesant sur les bas salaires.

The targeting efficiency and the coverage of social programs for the poor are typically analyzed by partitioning the total population in four mutually exclusive groups: the poor who benefit from a program or policy, the poor who do not benefit, the non-poor who benefit, and the non-poor who do not benefit. While useful, this partition into crisp sets may not capture the difficulty of identifying the poor. This paper presents a method that consists of using a membership function to identify to what extent households can be considered as poor or non-poor. The method builds on fuzzy sets theory whereby the definition of the boundaries of a set, say the poor or the non-poor, is fuzzy. We characterize the properties that membership functions should have, and we test for the robustness of targeting performance comparisons to the choice of the membership function.

Cet article developpe un argument theorique sur l’optimalite de la decroissance demographique en presence d’une ressource naturelle non renouvelable, necessaire a la production. On etudie les politiques de subsides a la natalite et on montre que ceux-ci ne changent pas le taux de decroissance de la population sur le sentier equilibre. Ils induisent, par contre, une reduction de la consommation per capita.

We analyze the effect of stochastic survival of children on fertility decision in a dynastic utility model where saving, so to speak, can only be made through having children, the number of which is an endogenous decision to the household. In our stochastic framework where the rate of population change undergoes a process of Brownian motion, the probability distribution of the steady state is well determined, and saving via the number of offsprings incorporates a precautionary component. Any health care assistance proposed to reduce the variance of the Brownian process, for example, to reduce the risk of premature infantile mortality, would have a negative effect on the fertility rate and a positive effect on the per capita consumption in the long run.

Income variablity is likely to increase wage inequality if poorer households are more vulnerable to shocks. Using a simple method to estimate risk-adjusted measures of wage inequality and data from Mexico, this note shows that safety nets could offset a good part of the impact of risk aversion on wage inequality.

When assessing socioeconomic health inequalities researchers often draw upon measures of income inequality that were developed for ratio scale variables. As a result, the use of categorical data (such as self-reported health status) produces rankings that may be arbitrary and contingent to the scaling adopted. In this paper, we develop a method that overcomes this problem by providing conditions for which these rankings are invariant to the scaling function chosen by the researcher. In doing so, we draw on the insight provided by Alkire and Foster (2004) and extend their method to the dimension of socioeconomic inequality exploiting the properties of Wagstaff’s class of indices. We then provide an empirical illustration using the National Institute of Health Survey 2012.

Foreword: Peter Lambert Introduction: Joseph Deutsch and Jacques Silber Part 1: Deprivation, Happiness and Well-Being 1. A Survey on Income Deprivation Conchita D'Ambrosio 2. Happiness, Deprivation and the Alter Ego Paolo Verme Part 2: Polarization 3. Measuring Bi-Polarization and Polarization: A Survey Zoya Nissanov, Ambra Poggi and Jacques Silber 4. Inequality and Polarization: An Axiomatic Approach Satya R. Chakravarty, Nachiketa Chattopadhyay and Bhargav Maharaj 5. Rank-Dependent Measures of Bi-polarization and Marginal Tax Reforms Paul Makdissi and Stephane Mussard 6. Analyzing the Impact of Income Sources on Changes in Bi-Polarization Joseph Deutsch and Jacques Silber Part 3: Distributional Change and Mobility 7. Distributional Change Frank Cowell 8. Galton's Fallacy and the Measurement of Wage Mobility Michal Weber Part 4: On the Decomposition of Income and Wage Inequality 9. The Gini Inequality Index Decomposition: an Evolutionary Study Giovanni Maria Giorgi 10. On the Shapley Value and Decompositions of the Gender Gap Osnat Israeli 11. A Note on the Determinants of Wage Inequality Between and Within Genders Giovanni Ferro-Luzzi Part 5: Individual Well-Being and Poverty 12. A New Model for Constructing Poverty Thresholds Nanak Kakwani 13. Comparing Multidimensional Poverty With Qualitative Indicators of Well-Being Yele Maweki Batana and Jean-Yves Duclos 14. Empirical Modeling of Deprivation Contagion Among Social Exclusion Dimensions Ambra Poggi and Xavier Ramos

In this chapter, we investigate the geographical and sectoral profiles of poverty in Lebanon using data from the country’s 2004 National Survey of Households Living Conditions (NSHLC). With this objective in mind, we have adopted both unidimensional monetary approaches and multidimensional approaches to poverty. In the case of multidimensional approaches we focus on four dimensions of poverty: expenditure, education, housing conditions, and access to basic services. The poverty measures are estimated according to standard monetary FGT indices and their extension, based on Alkire and Foster’s method, in the multidimensional case. The robustness of rankings (by mohafaza and by occupational sector) resulting from these measures is then tested using stochastic dominance procedures. Our findings suggest that caution should be exercised when the conclusions drawn from typical poverty profiles depend on the researchers’ arbitrary decisions. Also, they shed light on the limitations of conducting an analysis that is solely based on the monetary dimension of poverty, as it may not necessarily corroborate the results provided by multidimensional analysis.

This paper proposes a methodology for testing for whether tax reforms are pro-poor. This is done by extending stochastic dominance techniques to identify tax reforms that will be deemed absolutely or relatively pro-poor by a wide spectrum of poverty analysts. The statistical properties of the various estimators are also derived in order to make the method implementable using survey data. The methodology is used to assess the pro-poorness of possible reforms to Mexico's indirect tax system. This leads to the identification of several possible pro-poor tax reforms in that country. It also shows how the pro-poorness of a tax reform depends on one's conception of poverty as well as on the revenue and efficiency impact of the reform. © 2013 Springer Science+Business Media New York., This work was carried out with support from SSHRC, FQRSC and the Poverty and Economic Policy Research Network, which is financed by the Government of Canada through the International Development Research Centre and the Canadian International Development Agency, and by the Australian Agency for International Development

While many of the measurement approaches in health inequality measurement assume the existence of a ratio-scale variable, most of the health information available in population surveys is given in the form of categorical variables. Therefore, the well-known inequality indices may not always be readily applicable to measure health inequality as it may result in the arbitrariness of the health concentration index's value. In this paper, we address this problem by changing the dimension in which the categorical information is used. We therefore exploit the multi-dimensionality of this information, define a new ratio-scale health status variable and develop positional stochastic dominance conditions that can be implemented in a context of categorical variables. We also propose a parametric class of population health and socioeconomic health inequality indices. Finally we provide a twofold empirical illustration using the Joint Canada/United States Surveys of Health 2004 and the National Health Interview Survey 2010.

This paper argues that health transfers from an individual at a lower rank in the health distribution to a person at a higher rank may decrease the concentration index if the former has a slightly higher income. The concentration index, being mainly focused on the socio-economic dimension of health inequality, can produce such counter-intuitive results that overlook the pure health inequality aversion of the planner. Building on Atkinson (1970), Yitzhaki (1983) and Wagstaff (2002), this paper presents a simple new class of health achievement and health inequality indices that overcomes the above mentioned problem.

This paper uses a fuzzy-fuzzy stochastic dominance approach to compare patients’ leakages in the Canadian and the U.S. health care systems. Leakages are defined in terms of individuals who are in bad health and could not have access to health care when needed. To carry his comparison we rely on the assumption that Canada is a strong counterfactual for the U.S. We first develop a class of fuzzy leakages indices and incorporate them in a stochastic dominance framework to derive the dominance criterion. We then use the derived criterion to perform inter-country comparisons on the global level. To provide more insight, we decompose the analysis with respect to gender, ethnicity, income and education. Intra-country comparisons reveal the presence of income based leakage inequalities in both countries yet, gender, ethnic and education based disparities appear to be present in the U.S. only. As for inter-country comparisons, results are in general consistent with the hypothesis that leakages are less important under the Canadian health care system.

This paper uses a fuzzy-fuzzy stochastic dominance approach to compare patients’ leakages in the Canadian and the U.S. health care systems. Leakages are defined in terms of individuals who are in bad health and could not have access to health care when needed. To carry his comparison we rely on the assumption that Canada is a strong counter-factual for the U.S. We first develop a class of fuzzy leakages indices and incorporate them in a stochastic dominance framework to derive the dominance criterion. We then use the derived criterion to perform inter-country comparisons on the global level. To provide more insight, we decompose the analysis with respect to gender, ethnicity, income and education. Intra-country comparisons reveal the presence of income based leakage inequalities in both countries yet, gender, ethnic and education based disparities appear to be present in the U.S. only. As for inter-country comparisons, results are in general consistent with the hypothesis that leakages are less important under the Canadian health care system.

This paper proposes a methodology for testing for whether tax reforms are pro-poor. This is done by extending stochastic dominance techniques to identify tax reforms that will be deemed absolutely or relatively pro-poor by a wide spectrum of poverty analysts. The statistical properties of the various estimators are also derived in order to make the method implementable using survey data. The methodology is used to assess the pro-poorness of possible reforms to Mexico’s indirect tax system. This leads to the identification of several possible pro-poor tax reforms in that country. It also shows how the pro-poorness of a tax reform depends on one’s conception of poverty as well as on the revenue and eciency impact of the reform.

In this paper, we investigate a dual class of bi-polarization indices, namely rank-dependent bi-polarization indices. We show that these indices may be characterized with the generalized positional transfer sensitivity property. We find necessary and sufficient conditions in order to identify bi-polarization-reducing marginal tax reforms. Precisely, we propose inverse positional dominance criteria based on the comparison of bi-polarization concentration curves. An illustration is presented using the Jordanian Household Expenditure and Income Survey 2002/2003.

Under price ceilings and quality floors for agricultural inputs in cash crop sectors in developing countries where credit markets are weak, imperfect information on the ability of farmers to pay for their inputs at the end of the cropping season may lead the decentralized production of those inputs by risk averse private input providers to be inefficient. A coordinating agency and/or subsidies for new farmers could help to produce and distribute more agricultural inputs, thereby increasing the profits for input providers while also enabling more farmers to produce the crops that are key to their livelihood.

Housing deprivation orderings raise challenges as far as measurement is concerned. The first challenge resides in the identification of an adequate variable that characterizes housing services consumed by households. Another challenge may arise in the comparisons of housing services consumption between households of different sizes and composition. The last challenge may arise in the choice of a deprivation threshold and of a deprivation index. In this paper we address theoretically those challenges. An empirical illustration is offered using Lebanese data.

In this article, we analyze the redistributive impact of a recent reform of tuition fees in Quebec. We adapt Duclos, Makdissi and Wodon's (2005) methodology to a Generalized Lorenz framework. Many policy analysts argued that maintaining low higher education tuition fees is regressive. We take a look at the empirical validity of this argument using data from Statistics Canada's Survey of Labor and Income Dynamics. We show the importance of using data to validate this argument. The results obtained allow for the conclusion that this redistributive argument is empirically not verified for the Province of Québec.

Under price ceilings and quality floors for agricultural inputs in cash crop sectors in developing countries where credit markets are weak, imperfect information on the ability of farmers to pay for their inputs at the end of the cropping season may lead the decentralized production of those inputs by risk averse private input providers to be inefficient. A coordinating agency and/or subsidies for new farmers could help to produce and distribute more agricultural inputs, thereby increasing the profits for input providers while also enabling more farmers to produce the crops that are key to their livelihood.

For any given order of inverse stochastic dominance, standard concentration curves are decomposed into three components, called contribution curves. Those compo nents correspond to within-group inequalities, between-group inequalities, and transvari ational inequalities. We prove, for all orders, that contribution curve dominance implies systematically welfare-improving tax reforms and conversely. Accordingly, as welfare ex pansions may be costly in terms of particular inequalities, we propose targeted fiscal reforms. JEL classification: D63, H20

In this paper, we use consumption dominance curves, a tool developed by Makdissi and Wodon (2002) in order to assess the redistributive impact of electricity subsidies in Guinea. The data in the 'Enquête Intégrée de Base pour l'Évaluation de la Pauvreté (EIBEP) 2002-2003’ show that subsidizing electricity is not consistent with a poverty reduction objective. Dans cet article, nous utilisons des courbes de dominance de consommation développées par Makdissi et Wodon (2002) afin d'analyser l'impact distributif des subsides d’électricité instaurées par le gouvernement guinéen. L'Enquête Intégrée de Base pour l'Évaluation de la Pauvreté (EIBEP) 2002-2003 nous permet de conclure que ces subsides ne peuvent être justifiés dans un contexte de lutte à la pauvreté.

This paper develops criteria for an alternative concept of inequality dominance and shows how they relate to criteria for comparing relative poverty. The results warn inter alia against the use of some popular indices of inequality. They do, however, provide an ethical basis for the use of other popular indices of (restricted) inequality as potential relative poverty indices. The results also suggest an interesting extension of the Schutz coefficient as well as a use of Lorenz curves for the analysis of relative poverty and restricted inequality. A graphical illustration shows how the new criteria of restricted inequality dominance extend the ranking power of previously proposed inequality dominance criteria.

We develop two public choice models in which environmental regulation is determined endogenously in the presence of agents who are heterogenous in wealth or income. In the first model, regulation is determined by a majority vote, and an increase in inequality induces an increase in environmental standard. In the second model, the environmental standard is chosen by a corrupt bureaucrat. In that model, while the impact of an increase in inequality on the environmental standard is uncertain, a higher level of corruption always reduces the quality of environmental regulation. An empirical analysis using cross-country data confirms the implication of both models.

Throughout this article, we utilize consumption dominance curves, a tool developed by Makdissi and Wodon (2002) to analyze the impacts on poverty brought on by changes in the food subsidy system in Egypt. The Egypt Integrated Household Survey (EIHS) of 1997 allows us to conclude that changes brought to these subsidies have not always worked towards alleviating poverty.