Aversion to inequality in Italy and its determinants

Vincenzo Atella, Jay Coggins and Federico Perali

CHILD Working Papers from CHILD - Centre for Household, Income, Labour and Demographic economics - ITALY

Abstract: The main goal of this paper is to estimate the preferences of the Italian society towards equity in order to verify whether preferences i) have changed across the years, and ii) can be related to specific sociodemographic characteristics. Introducing equity concerns in the implementation of economic policies is a fundamental problem faced by both economists and policy makers. This paper uses a social welfare function a la Jorgenson and Slesnick to estimate society’s aversion towards inequality by implementing a voting scheme for compiling individuals’ equity preferences into a social choice by majority rule. The results show that preferences are highly polarized toward a low and a high concern for equity aversion and that this concern is significantly related with several sociodemographic characteristics. Among them, income plays an important role with richer people that tend to favor less equity. Results also show that preferences towards equity have changed across the years.

Keywords: inequity; equity; welfare; social function (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C10 D10 J10 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 32 pages
Date: 2002-11
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.child.carloalberto.org/images/wp/child03_2003.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Aversion to inequality in Italy and its determinants (2005)
Journal Article: Aversion to inequality in Italy and its determinants (2004)
Working Paper: Aversion to Inequality in Italy and its Determinants (2004)
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:wpc:wplist:wp03_03

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CHILD Working Papers from CHILD - Centre for Household, Income, Labour and Demographic economics - ITALY Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Giovanni Bert ().