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Abstract Is horizontal equity (HE) the 'most widely accepted principle of equity'? Or does it stand in 'opposition to the advancement of human welfare'? This paper argues that the case for the HE principle is not as straightforward as is usually thought and that it requires advanced notions of justice and well‐being. The most likely ethical basis for HE appears to combine a Rawlsian maximin principle and a view of well‐being that allows for relative local comparison effects. The paper also explores some of the dimensions of equality and well‐being along which the HE principle can be applied and presents a number of examples showing how HE considerations can provide an important input into policy analysis.

Evidence of incomplete participation in welfare programmes is often displayed. This paper analyses how such apparent failures to participate can be explained by the presence of random errors in assessing benefit eligibility, by income underreporting, by benefit misreporting, and by participation costs. We apply the model to the receipts of supplementary benefits in Britain. A bivariate extension of the use of generalized residuals in testing the robustness of limited‐dependent‐variable models is provided and fails to reject a number of our stochastic assumptions.

ABSTRACTThe paper proposes an indicator of the performance of a tax and benefit system in generating a high level of social welfare. Under standard assumptions on the form of the admissible social welfare functions, the indicator is shown to be increasing in the progressivity of the system. Using UK household data for 1985, the paper asks (i) What can the performance of a tax system with constant residual progression be? (ii) Relative to a proportional system, what is the performance of existing or proposed tax and benefit systems? (iii) How can we estimate the average residual progression of unevenly progressive tax and benefit systems?

This text addresses the understanding and alleviation of poverty, inequality, and inequity using a unique and broad mix of concepts, measurement methods, statistical tools, software, and practical exercises. Part I discusses basic fundamental issues of well-being and poverty measurement. Part II develops an integrated framework for measuring poverty, social welfare, inequality, vertical equity, horizontal equity, and redistribution. Part III presents and develops recent methods for testing the robustness of distributive rankings. Part IV discusses ways of using policy to alleviate poverty, improve welfare, increase equity, and assess the impact of growth. Part V applies the tools to real data.

This text addresses the understanding and alleviation of poverty, inequality, and inequity using a unique and broad mix of concepts, measurement methods, statistical tools, software, and practical exercises. Part I discusses basic fundamental issues of well-being and poverty measurement. Part II develops an integrated framework for measuring poverty, social welfare, inequality, vertical equity, horizontal equity, and redistribution. Part III presents and develops recent methods for testing the robustness of distributive rankings. Part IV discusses ways of using policy to alleviate poverty, improve welfare, increase equity, and assess the impact of growth. Part V applies the tools to real data. Most of the book's measurement and statistical tools have been programmed in DAD, a well established and widely available free software program that has been tailored especially for income distribution analysis and is used by scholars, researchers, and analysts in nearly 100 countries worldwide. It requires basic understanding of calculus and statistics. Abdelkrim Araar and Jean-Yves Duclos teach economics at Université Laval in Québec City.

We consider changes in the distribution of hourly compensation in Canada using confidential census data and the recent National Household Survey over the last three decades. We find that the coefficient of variation of wages among full-time workers has almost doubled between 1980 and 2010. The rapid growth of the 99.9th percentile is the main driver of that increase. Changes in the composition of the workforce explain less than one-third of the rise in wage inequality. However, composition changes explain most of the increase in average hourly compensation over those three decades, while wages stagnate within skill groups.

AbstractThe evaluation of development processes and of public policies often involves comparisons of social states that differ in income distributions, population sizes and life longevity. This may require social evaluation principles to be sensitive to the quality, the quantity and the duration of lives. This paper: 1) reviews some of the normative issues at stake, 2) proposes and discusses some specific methods to address them in a generalized utilitarian framework and 3) briefly illustrates the application of some of these methods to the global distribution of incomes, population sizes and longevity over the last century. Depending on the approach taken, it is found inter alia that global social welfare in 2010 can be deemed to be between 1.8 and 407 times that of 1910, the role given to the quantity of lives being particularly important in that assessment.

AbstractAssessments of "social welfare" do not usually take into account population sizes. This can lead to serious social evaluation flaws, particularly in contexts in which policies can affect demographic growth. We develop in this paper a little‐known though ethically attractive approach to correcting the flaws of traditional social evaluations, an approach that is sensitive to population sizes and that is based on critical‐level generalized utilitarianism (CLGU). Traditional CLGU is extended by considering arbitrary orders of welfare dominance and ranges of "poverty lines," as well as values for the "critical level" of how much a life must be minimally worth to contribute to social welfare. We apply these social evaluation methods to rank Canada across 1976, 1986, 1996 and 2006 and to estimate normatively and statistically robust lower and upper bounds of critical levels over which these rankings can be made.