 The Influence of Demographics and Household‐Specific Price Indices on Consumption‐Based Inequality and Welfare: A Comparison of Spain and the United StatesThesia I. Garner,
Javier Ruiz‐Castillo and
Mercedes Sastre
Southern Economic Journal, 2003, vol. 70, issue 1, 22-48 Abstract: Previous research has suggested that inequality is lower in Spain than in the United States when it is based on income. For the present article, both inequality and social welfare are examined, with household consumption expenditures used as a proxy for household welfare. For tractability, equivalence scales depended only on the number of people in the household. Household‐specific price indices were used to express the 1990‐1991 expenditure distributions in 1981 and 1991 winter prices. Our results reveal that inequality and welfare comparisons are drastically different for smaller and larger households. When all households are considered, the two‐country comparison suggests that the income inequality ranking can only be maintained for expenditure distributions when economies of scale are small or nonexistent. However, welfare is always higher in the United States than in Spain. Because inflation during the 1980s in both countries was essentially distributionally neutral, all results appear to be robust to the choice of time period. Date: 2003 Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wly:soecon:v:70:y:2003:i:1:p:22-48 Access Statistics for this article More articles in Southern Economic Journal from John Wiley & Sons |
Is your work missing from RePEc? Here is how to contribute.
Questions or problems? Check the EconPapers FAQ or send mail to .
EconPapers is hosted by the
School of Business at Örebro University.