A well-crafted retail sales tax on all goods and services could replace all 36 other state-level taxes in Kansas— including the personal and corporate income taxes. The tax rate could be eight percent (8%) or less, after the state government makes budget adjustments related to the recent recession-driven revenue shortfalls. Such a bold move holds the promise of making Kansas one of the most gro...

We explore how integrating into the world economy affects the incomes of manufacturers in less developed countries (LDCs). We show that cutting back trade barriers has asymmetric effects on the incomes of the two typical groups of entrepreneurs. Whereas access to foreign markets benefits those entrepreneurs who are able to run large-scale factories, credit-rationed entrepreneurs running a micro...

Poverty and Transitions in Health Using a sample of Europeans aged 50+ from twelve countries in the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) we analyse the role of poor material conditions as a determinant of changes in health over a four-year period. We find that poverty defined with respect to relative incomes has no effect on changes in health. However, broader measures of p...

Much of the recent literature distinguishes between exogenous and endogenous growth models. We have studied the former, and now we look at the latter. What is the difference? The importance difference is that in the former the steady-state growth rate is determined exogenously, e.g., technical change. In the latter, it is determined endogenously. The models are interesting because they often le...

Income is an important correlate for numerous phenomena in the social sciences. But many surveys collect data with just a single question covering all forms of income. This raises questions over the reliability of the data collected. Issues of reliability are heightened when individuals are asked about the household total rather than own income alone. We argue that the large literature on measu...

The average earnings of the disabled are much less than those of the nondisabled o A number of transfer programs have been designed to provide income to the disabled. After transfers, the differences in personal and/or family income between disabled and nondisabled, on average, are not so great. However, the disabled still have lower average incomes than others. The incomes and earnings of disa...

Facts state that India's 70 per cent of the population resides in hinterlands and 56 per cent of the overall consumption comes from there. Rural Indians are no more inferior to the country's urban clan. Increase in incomes, rising non-farm employment opportunities, higher aspirations and the Government's focus on rural sustainability schemes are major factors that have been driving the rural ma...

The paper uses the Lewis model as a framework for examining the labour market progress of two labour-abundant countries, China and South Africa, towards labour shortage and generally rising labour real incomes. In the acuteness of their rural-urban divides, forms of migrant labour, rapid rural-urban migration, and high and rising real wages in the formal sector, the two economies are surprising...

BACKGROUND In the UK and many other countries, many specialties have had longstanding problems with recruitment and have increasingly relied on international medical graduates to fill junior and senior posts. We aimed to determine what specialties were the most popular and desirable among candidates for training posts, and whether this differed by country of undergraduate training. METHODS We...

More than 1 billion people today are between 15 and 25 years of age and nearly 40 per cent of the world’s population is below the age of 20. However, eighty-five per cent of young people live in developing countries where a vast majority of them are struggling to learn and work in a context of extreme poverty. According to World Bank figures, approximately 1.2 billion people struggle for surviv...