Using the national income expenditure distribution data from 111 countries, we decompose total inequality between the individuals in the world, by continents and regions. We use Yitzhaki’s Gini decomposition which allows for an exact breakdown of the Gini. We find that Asia is the most heterogeneous continent; between-country inequality is much more important than inequality in incomes within c...

Three issues are addressed in this paper. First, we use both household and macro data to establish how fast per capita consumption and incomes grew in Ghana in the 1990s. Second, we ask how much of the rise in incomes was due to rises in the level of human capital and how much reflected underlying technical progress. Third, we assess the implications of how incomes rose for the interpretation o...

An examination of the distribution of physician incomes between different types of practices could help policymakers and researchers alike to gain an understanding of the effects of different organizational characteristics of practices on the practice of medicine as a whole. This study uses a national database to explore the relationships that exist between practice incomes and practice types v...

This paper examines trends in the assets and incomes of older Australians between 1986 and 1998. The average wealth of older Australians almost doubled from $106,000 to $204,000 between 1986 and 1998. This was in sharp contrast to the fall in the average wealth holdings of Australians aged less than 45 years over the same time period. The average picture for older Australians masked major diffe...

I consider how the saving behavior of consumers is affected by incomes in their reference group. Although standard life cycle models with interdependent preferences provide no clear cut prediction of how incomes in one’s reference group should influence savings, the empirical analysis points to an unambiguously negative effect: If incomes in the reference group are higher, savings are lower. Th...

We found a uni ed formula for description of the household incomes of all society classes, for instance, of those of the European Union in year 2007. This formula is a stationary solution of the threshold Fokker Planck equation (derived from the threshold nonlinear Langevin one). The formula is more general than the well known that of Yakovenko et al. because it satisfactorily describes not onl...

This paper estimates the returns to health and nutrition in both farm and off-farm activities of agricultural households in rural Bangladesh. The findings of this paper indicate that the health of adults in rural Bangladesh influences the households’ choice of employment activities as well as their incomes given their participation decisions. Adult height has a significant positive effect on of...

This article uses a microsimulation model to estimate how freezing all remaining private-sector and one-third of all public-sector defined benefit (DB) pension plans over the next 5 years would affect retirement incomes of baby boomers. If frozen plans were supplemented with new or enhanced defined contribution (DC) retirement plans, there would be more losers than winners, and average family i...

Will raising the incomes of all increase the happiness of all?” Intuition says 'yes' but theories of relative utility caution that the answer may be ‘no’. The theory of relative utility holds that rises in income will produce at best short-lived gains in happiness. If people’s happiness depends on income relative to others (social comparisons), or on income relative to their own past income (ad...

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