A group of scholars converging on a common and socially relevant economic theme of research, that of households' welfare and poverty, met several times in the last two years to discuss the research progress and the opportunity to bring to gether for publication the research so far accomplished. They shared a research project supported by a grant from the former Italian Ministero dell'Universita e della Ricerca Scientifica e Tecnologica (MURST) now Ministero dell'Istruzione, dell'Universita e della Ricerca (MIUR): The Equiva lence Scales in the Measurement of Households' Welfare: Statistical, Economic and Demographic Analysis. The decisive meeting, an international seminar on the topics, was hosted by the University of Florence, siege of the national coordinator of this project. When one think of Florence, it is inevitable to think of the unfolding of Ren aissance, and reciprocally. th To the eyes of a traveller who had arrived to Florence in the 15 century, the city would have appeared as a sort of El Dorado, similarly to what would have occurred to the first conquerors of the South America's lands, so much astonishing were the richness of arts and the opulence of life. The flourishing of painting and sculpture had not equal all over the world and was reaching tops never made equal before. Masaccio, Brunelleschi, Donatello and later on Leonardo and Michelangelo, were the artistic and intellectual genius that enlightened beauty lovers princes.....

This impressive collection from leading distributional analysts provides an overview of a wide range of economic, statistical and sociological relationships. The resulting book deserves its place on the bookshelf of serious mathematical economists everywhere.

This collection of essays covers a diverse set of topics related to household behavior and welfare. Prices play a key role in several of the essays, particularly the distributional implications of price movements, and the effects of changes in relative prices on inequality and poverty. This book shows the shift in the literature on prices from being an exclusively macro topic featuring the study of inflation and cross-country comparisons to one that is firmly rooted in micro theory-based analysis of household behavior. It also includes recent developments in the poverty measurement literature, documenting the shift from the exclusively money metric and unidimensional poverty measures to multidimensional poverty encompassing a wider view of deprivation. Largely, but not exclusively, focusing on India, the book also features global comparisons of welfare. Intra country spatial comparisons along with cross country comparisons of household behavior and welfare feature in several of the essays in this book. The book also compares the effects of selected public delivery schemes in India on the health of its children. It is a useful resource for researchers and serves as reading material for advanced graduate courses on development in India and elsewhere.

The motive force of human activity that propels the stream of progress is here caught at its source, in its most modest, material expressions. The mechanism of the passions acting as determinant in these low spheres is less complex and can therefore be observed with greater precision. All one need do is leave the picture its clear, calm colors and its simple design. Gradually, as that search for material well-being by which man is tormented grows and expand, it also tends to rise and pursue an ascendant course thorough the social classes. In 'I Malavoglia' it is still only the struggle for material needs. Once these needs are satisfied, the search turns into greed for riches and will be embedded in a bourgeois type . . . Giovanni Verga, from the Introduction to The House by the Medlar Tree (I Malavoglia) Motivation In the past decade, many less developed countries have undertaken structural adjustment programs with the hope of breaking the vicious circle of the depression that enveloped them during the 1980s and of loosening the suffocating grip of the debt crisis. Nearly always, macroeconomic stabilization implies a reduction of public spending and, consequently, a reduction of subsidies on wage goods and food production. Other macro policies, such as tariff elimination and exchange rates alignment, alter relative prices and may have significant effects on the level and distribution of income. Today, poverty and inequality are perceived as economic threats as a result of globalization and unbalanced market expansion.

This collection of thirteen essays on social ethics and normative economics honouring Serge-Christophe Kolm's seminal contributions to this field addresses the following questions: How should the public sector price its production and services? What are the normative foundations of criteria for comparing distributions of riches and advantages? How should intergenerational social immobility and inequality in circumstances be measured? What is a fair way to form partnerships? How vulnerable to manipulation is the Lindahl rule for allocating public goods? What are the properties of Kolm's ELIE tax proposal? Would the addition of EU-level income taxes enhance equity? How should we compare different scenarios for future societies with different population sizes? How can domain conditions in social choice theory be justified using Kolm's epistemic counterfactuals? How can Kolm's distributive liberal contract be implemented? What are the implications of norms of reciprocity for the organization of society? The answers to these questions give major insight into the state-of-the-art of social ethics and normative economics and are thus an indispensable source for researchers in both of these fields.

This book investigates the relationships between economies of scale in food consumption and a number of socio-economic and demographic characteristics of households and household behavioural choices since food is the major share of household expenditure for poor households. The characteristics considered comprise household size, location, income, and gender of the head of household while the behavioural choices considered comprise the decision to consume home-grown food and the decision to adopt domestic technology to aid food preparation and consumption. The book proposes two theoretical models to rationalize the role of the consumption of home-grown food and the adoption of domestic technology in enhancing economies of scale in food consumption. Econometric models are also used to empirically test the validity of the two theoretical models while adjusted poverty estimations are derived numerically using the estimated equivalence scales. Although data used in applying these techniques are based on four Household Income and Expenditure Surveys conducted by the Department of Census and Statistics (DCS) in Sri Lanka, the methodology can be used for similar analysis in relation to any other country.