Did global income inequality rise or fall over the last decades of the twentieth century? The answer depends on how cross-country income comparisons are made. Exchange rate comparisons suggest that inequality rose whilst the purchasing power comparisons of the Penn World Table suggest it fell. We show that both measures of real incomes lead to biased international income comparisons. Exchange rate comparisons ignore the relative price of non-tradables, whilst the fixed price method underlying the Penn World Table is subject to substitution bias. The contradictory trends are due to growing dissimilarity between national price structures increasing the degree of bias in each method. When we correct the income data to eliminate bias we find no compelling evidence of a significant change in world inequality. Copyright 2005 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
Did global income inequality rise or fall over the last decades of the twentieth century? The answer depends on how cross-country income comparisons are made. Exchange rate comparisons suggest that inequality rose whilst the purchasing power comparisons of the Penn World Table suggest it fell. We show that both measures of real incomes lead to biased international income comparisons. Exchange rate comparisons ignore the relative price of non-tradables, whilst the fixed price method underlying the Penn World Table is subject to substitution bias. The contradictory trends are due to growing dissimilarity between national price structures increasing the degree of bias in each method. When we correct the income data to eliminate bias we find no compelling evidence of a significant change in world inequality.
The combination of 0.2% GTN and 2% lignocaine showed better pain relief resulting in less use of oral analgesics and faster healing of the wound after Milligan Morgan hemorrhoidectomy.
Islamic finance and insurance are penetrating in international markets especially after world economic crisis since 2008. This research is an attempt to analyze customers' satisfaction for the services of conventional and Islamic insurance companies in Pakistan. A modified SERVQUAL model is used to measure the service quality in the constructs of reliability, responsiveness, empathy, convenience and Sharīʻah compliance. For this purpose primary data of 400 customers, 173 from conventional and 227 from Islamic insurance companies, is estimated through propensity score matching as well as linear, non-linear and non-parametric classification techniques. The results on service quality indicate significant gap between expectation and perception of overall insurance industry. No significant difference of service quality is found between conventional and Islamic insurance companies in the constructs of reliability, responsiveness, convenience and empathy. The findings suggest a significant improvement in the service quality of conventional and Islamic insurance industry. Particularly, the conventional insurance companies need to focus on young people, private employees and lower income groups, whereas the Islamic insurance companies have to put more efforts to improve Sharīʻah compliance and to attract self-employed and higher income groups.
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