This paper provides a normative framework for the assessment of the distributional incidence of growth. By removing the anonymity axiom, such framework is able to evaluate the individual income changes over time and the reshuffling of individuals along the income distribution that are determined by the pattern of income growth. We adopt a rank dependent social welfare function expressed in terms of initial rank and individual income change and we obtain partial and complete dominance conditions over different growth paths. These dominance conditions account for the different components determining the overall impact of growth, that is the size of growth and its vertical and horizontal incidence. We then provide an empirical application for Italy: this analysis shows the distributional impact of the recent economic crisis suffered by the Italian populaltion.JEL Codes: D31, D63, D71
In this paper, we argue that a better understanding of the relationship between inequality and economic growth can be obtained by shifting the analysis from the space of final achievements to the space of opportunities. To this end, we introduce a formal framework based on the concept of the Opportunity Growth Incidence Curve. This framework can be used to evaluate the income dynamics of specific groups of the population and to infer the role of growth in the evolution of inequality of opportunity over time. We show the relevance of the introduced framework by providing two empirical analyses, one for Italy and the other for Brazil. These analyses show the distributional impact of the recent growth experienced by Brazil and the recent crisis suffered by Italy from both the income inequality and opportunity inequality perspectives. JEL codes: D63, E24, O15, O40 In recent years, a central topic in the economic development literature has been the measurement of the distributive impact of growth (see Ferreira 2010). This literature has provided analytical tools to identify and quantify the effect of growth on distributional phenomena such as income poverty and income inequality. Indices for measuring the pro-poorness of growth have been proposed, 2 and the Growth Incidence Curve (GIC), measuring the quantile-specific rate of economic growth in a given period of time (Ravallion and Chen 2003; Son 2004), has become a standard tool in evaluating growth from a distributional viewpoint. The interplay among growth, inequality, and poverty reduction has
The Policy Research Working Paper Series disseminates the findings of work in progress to encourage the exchange of ideas about development issues. An objective of the series is to get the findings out quickly, even if the presentations are less than fully polished. The papers carry the names of the authors and should be cited accordingly. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this paper are entirely those of the authors. They do not necessarily represent the views of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/World Bank and its affiliated organizations, or those of the Executive Directors of the World Bank or the governments they represent.
We propose a characterization of an aggregate measure of growth that takes into account the initial economic conditions of individuals. Our measure is a weighted average of individuals' income growth with weights that are decreasing with the rank of the individual in the initial income distribution. We apply our theoretical framework to evaluate the growth processes experienced by the Italian population. Even when we correct for the differences in mean income growth, and focus on the distribution of growth only, the 2008-2010 growth process was the worst of the last decade.
The Policy Research Working Paper Series disseminates the findings of work in progress to encourage the exchange of ideas about development issues. An objective of the series is to get the findings out quickly, even if the presentations are less than fully polished. The papers carry the names of the authors and should be cited accordingly. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this paper are entirely those of the authors. They do not necessarily represent the views of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/World Bank and its affiliated organizations, or those of the Executive Directors of the World Bank or the governments they represent.
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