This paper contains the main results concerning the evaluation of the consumption distribution of Iran in terms of levels, shape, inequality and social welfare for the years 1989 and 1994. The results show that the shape of consumption distribution in Iran is showed to the right and there is a large gap between the average level of consumption in rural and urban areas. Inequality in Iran is rel...

The People’s Republic of China (PRC) achieved rapid economic growth during the last 30 years, but its income distribution has worsened. In contrast, Republic of Korea and Taipei,China experienced high growth for several decades after the 1950s, while managing to keep income inequality low. This paper looks at development experiences of Republic of Korea and Taipei,China in the 1950s–1990s, and ...

In this paper we examine the relative importance of rural versus urban areas in terms of monetary poverty and seven other related living standards indicators. We present the levels of urban-rural differences for several African countries for which we have data and find that living standards in rural areas lag far behind those in urban areas. Then we examine the relative and absolute rates of ch...

The book defines three different concepts of world or inter-national inequality. The first uses unweighted countries’ GDPs per capita, the second, populationweighted GDPs per capita, the third, combines inter-national and internal income distribution to derive “true” world income distribution. According to the first and the second concept, inter-national inequality respectively increased and de...

This paper examines the concern for relative standing among rural households in China. We use a survey-experimental method to measure to what extent poor Chinese farmers care about their relative income and find that the respondents care to a high degree. Compared to previous studies in developed countries, the concern for relative standing seems to be equally strong among rural households in C...