Disparities in Socio-Economic Outcomes: Some Positive Propositions and their Normative Implications

Peter J. Lambert and S. Subramanian
Additional contact information
Peter J. Lambert: University of Oregon, USA
S. Subramanian: Madras Institute of Development Studies, India

No 281, Working Papers from ECINEQ, Society for the Study of Economic Inequality

Abstract: Demographic disparities between the rates of occurrence of an adverse economic outcome can be observed to be increasing even as general social improvements supposedly lead towards the elimination of the adverse outcome in question. Scanlan (2006) noticed this tendency and developed a ‘heuristic rule’ to explain it. In this paper, we explore the issue analytically, providing a criterion from stochastic ordering theory under which one of two demographic groups can be considered disadvantaged and the other advantaged, and showing that Scanlan’s heuristic obtains as a rigorous finding in such cases. Normative implications and appropriate social policy are discussed.

Keywords: disparity; economic outcome; poverty; mortality rate. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D63 I13 I31 I32 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 12 pages
Date: 2012-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dem
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.ecineq.org/milano/WP/ECINEQ2012-281.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:inq:inqwps:ecineq2012-281

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from ECINEQ, Society for the Study of Economic Inequality Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Maria Ana Lugo ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).