Pro-poor growth and the lognormal income distribution

Peter Lambert ()
Additional contact information
Peter Lambert: University of Oregon

No 130, Working Papers from ECINEQ, Society for the Study of Economic Inequality

Abstract: A widely accepted criterion for pro-poorness of an income growth pattern is that it should reduce a (chosen) measure of poverty by more than if all incomes were growing equiproportionately. Inequality reduction is not generally seen as either necessary or sufficient for pro-poorness. Because empirical income distributions fit well to the lognormal form, lognormality has sometimes been assumed in order to determine analytically the poverty effects of income growth. We show that in a lognormal world, growth is pro-poor in the above sense if and only if it is inequality-reducing. It follows that lognormality may not be a good paradigm by means of which to examine pro-poorness issues.

Keywords: poverty; growth; pro-poorness; lognormal distribution (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D31 D63 I32 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 16 pages
Date: 2009
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mic
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.ecineq.org/milano/WP/ECINEQ2009-130.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:ecineq2009-130

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 ).