This module illustrates how Generalised Lorenz (GL) Curves can be used to identify the best income distribution on social welfare grounds, within a set of alternative income distributions generated by different policy options, in many of the cases where ordinary Lorenz curves fail to work After...

This module illustrates how to define “relative” poverty lines, i.e. poverty lines based on approaches that consider the welfare position of each individual or household in relation to the welfare position of other individuals or households belonging to the same community. In particular, the...

This module illustrates how to define “absolute” poverty lines, i.e poverty lines based on approaches that consider the welfare position of each individual or household as if it were independent of the conditions of other individuals or households belonging to the same community. In...

This module illustrates how poverty can be defined in the context of policy impact analysis. After reporting and discussing the definition of poverty as “the lack of, or the inability to achieve, a socially acceptable standard of living”, it discusses the mono-dimensional and...

This paper illustrates how Lorenz Curves can be used to identify the best income distribution on social welfare grounds, within a set of alternative income distributions generated by different policy options. After highlighting some drawbacks of using specific functional forms of the Social...

This module describes two of the most commonly used poverty measures in applied policy works, i.e., the headcount ratio (HR) and the poverty gap (PG) ratio. These are basic poverty indicators used to investigate impacts of public policies on poverty. After providing a conceptual background to HR...

This paper explains how to build Lorenz Curves for income distributions and discusses their use for inequality measurement. A short conceptual background, a step-by-step procedure and a simple numerical example illustrate how to calculate and draw Lorenz Curves. A discussion on the use of Lorenz...

This paper provides additional insights on the relationship between government size and trade openness using a panel of countries drawn from the World Development Indicators and the Penn World Tables 7.0 from 1962 to 2009. It is shown that the compensation hypothesis proposed by Rodrik (1998)...

This paper provides empirical evidence of the relation between trade openness, capital openness and government expenditures in a cross sectional time-series context. It is shown that capital openness is significantly and negatively related to government expenditures in line with the conventional...

This paper introduces social considerations into the calculation of the price index. To this purpose, recourse is made to the concept of distributional characteristic. It is shown how an aggregate price index can be expressed as a weighted average of commodity-specific prices, with weights that...