OBJECTIVES This study assesses the affordability of a nutritious diet for households in Toronto that are supported by welfare. METHODS For three hypothetical households, welfare incomes were compared to the monthly costs for food, shelter, and other essential expenditures in Toronto. RESULTS If households lived in market rental accommodation, average monthly incomes were insufficient to cov...

"Poverty among the Czech elderly is considered from two perspectives: objective and subjective. Various indicators of objective poverty are analysed, such as the relation of average monthly income to average old-age pension, pension inequalities, the structure of household expenditures, and the structure of consumer durables ownership, as are representative survey data measuring subjective pove...

Sub-Saharan African women on small-acreage farms carry a disproportionately higher labor burden, which is one of the main reasons they are unable to produce for both home and the market and realize higher incomes. Labor-saving interventions such as hand-tools are needed to save time and/or increase productivity in, for example, land preparation for crop and animal agriculture, post-harvest proc...

Governments use redistributive policies to favor relatively unproductive economic sectors. Traditional economic wisdom teaches that the government should instead buy out the agents in these sectors, and let them relocate to more productive sectors.We show that redistribution to a sector whose agents have highly correlated incomes generates an insurance value. Taking this insurance value into ac...

This paper conducts an empirical study on output, costs and incomes in organic farming with a sample of Spanish firms. Financial accounting data reveals that organic and partly or transitional to organic farming do not get significantly different output than intensive farming. Farms in transition to organic farming bear significantly higher costs and obtain significantly lower income than inten...

Top income inequality has risen sharply in the United States over the last 30 years but remained low and stable in economies like France and Japan. Why? This paper explores three theoretical mechanisms that endogenize the amount of top income inequality. The first model suggests that the rate of growth of top incomes is a key determinant. A rise in the returns to experience or an increase in ef...

This paper discusses how an industrialized country could defend the living standard of its unskilled workers against the wage competition from immigrants. It shows that fixing social replacement incomes implies migration into unemployment. Defending wages with replacement incomes brings about first order efficiency losses that approximate the budget cost of the government. By contrast, wage sub...

Agriculture has to keep pace with the food requirements of increasing human populations. Also, with rising incomes, the consumption of meat and dairy products also rises. This has been very vividly reflected in several countries in South East Asia, including Malaysia. Meat consumption per capita is now well above 5% per year, and is likely to rise further. A major justification for improved ani...

esults from the most recent California Health Interview Survey (CHIS 2003) indicate that food insecurity has increased significantly among low-income California adults since 2001. In 2003, more than 2.9 million adults in low-income households – those with incomes less than 200% of the federal poverty level (FPL) – experienced periods during the year when they could not afford to put food on the...

A couple decades ago fiscal federalism used to be a topic of marginal importance in most countries and in the economic literature. The world was broadly divided in federal states and unitary states and there were hardly any countries that planned to move from one to the other of these categories. In recent years, however, perhaps as a result of globalization and deepening democratization, combi...