IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/hal/journl/halshs-04330985.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

On the social welfare interpretation of growth incidence curves

Author

Listed:
  • Yonatan Berman

    (King‘s College London)

  • François Bourguignon

    (PSE - Paris School of Economics - UP1 - Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne - ENS-PSL - École normale supérieure - Paris - PSL - Université Paris Sciences et Lettres - EHESS - École des hautes études en sciences sociales - ENPC - École des Ponts ParisTech - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - INRAE - Institut National de Recherche pour l’Agriculture, l’Alimentation et l’Environnement, PJSE - Paris Jourdan Sciences Economiques - UP1 - Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne - ENS-PSL - École normale supérieure - Paris - PSL - Université Paris Sciences et Lettres - EHESS - École des hautes études en sciences sociales - ENPC - École des Ponts ParisTech - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - INRAE - Institut National de Recherche pour l’Agriculture, l’Alimentation et l’Environnement)

Abstract

The Growth Incidence Curve (GIC), introduced in the poverty measurement literature by Ravallion and Chen (Econ. Lett. 78 (1), 93–99, 2003), proved to be a valuable and widely used tool to analyze the impact of growth on poverty and its ‘pro-poorness'. Beyond pro-poorness, however, the relationship between the shape of GICs and social welfare is ambiguous. If a declining GIC, together with a positive overall rate of growth, is unambiguously associated with a social welfare gain, such a shape is not the most common and the reciprocal is not necessarily true. This paper analyzes the social welfare properties of GICs, as well as their non-anonymous counterpart (NAGICs), which describe how income growth depends on the initial rank of individuals in the initial income distribution. NAGICs thus account not only for the change in the distribution of income but also for income mobility, and differ conceptually from their anonymous counterpart. However, their social welfare interpretation proves to be very similar.

Suggested Citation

  • Yonatan Berman & François Bourguignon, 2023. "On the social welfare interpretation of growth incidence curves," Post-Print halshs-04330985, HAL.
  • Handle: RePEc:hal:journl:halshs-04330985
    DOI: 10.1007/s10888-023-09598-2
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Other versions of this item:

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Growth; Mobility; Inequality; Social welfare;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D3 - Microeconomics - - Distribution
    • H0 - Public Economics - - General
    • J6 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Mobility, Unemployment, Vacancies, and Immigrant Workers

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:hal:journl:halshs-04330985. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: CCSD (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.