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This paper investigates the macroeconomic and social determinants of voting behavior, and especially of political polarization – defined here as the increasing electoral success of far-right and far-left parties – in 20 advanced countries using annual data from 1970 to 2016 and covering 291 parliamentary elections. Our analysis indicates that the link between income inequality and political polarization appears to have significantly changed over the last 20 years. Indeed, we find that both average net income inequality, as well as the bottom 10% income share are statistically linked to the recent success of far-right parties (but not of far-left parties), while the top 10% or top 20% income shares are not. The link of income inequality and political polarization, and in particular the increasing success of far-right parties, thus seems to be based on the deterioration of the relative economic position especially of the poorest fraction of the population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using data from the Chinese Household Income Project surveys of 2002, 2013, and 2018 and employing decomposition methods, this study is the first to examine the impact of the double negative effect on the wages of ethnic minority women in urban China. Three key conclusions emerge. First, the results indicate the presence of a double negative effect, with the gender wage gap effect being more pronounced than the ethnicity wage gap effect. This suggests that discrimination against women is the primary factor contributing to the formation of the wage gaps. Second, the decomposition results on wage distribution suggest that the return effect on both ethnicity and gender wage gaps is greater for the high-wage group than for the low- and medium-wage groups, suggesting workplace discrimination may be much more severe for the high-wage group. Third, the wage gaps and determinants of their formation differ by heterogenous ethnic minority groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

National housing systems increasingly combine three main types of housing: the private property sector (home ownership and private rental), social and public rental (public and non-profit sectors) and cooperative (social or civil economy). The dominant private type has facilitated housing speculation, which in many countries has become a critical source of economic inequality and instability. The cooperative housing type can be a viable alternative with a socio-spatial cohesion effect. This article compares the phenomena of socially oriented cooperative housing in three European countries (Denmark, The Netherlands and Spain). The analytical focus is on the public policies and regulations, and the societal and collective action factors that foster the development of housing cooperatives. The three cases present different institutional settings and ways to develop a socially oriented cooperative housing sector. The research findings contribute to mutual learning processes in searching alternatives to the commercial and very expensive private urban housing provision. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The objective of this paper is to suggest a mathematical model of unpaid housework and empirically test its main predictions using data from Mexico (2014) and Colombia (2017) time-use surveys. The model, based upon the Marxist-feminist approach, suggests that the magnitude of unpaid housework is determined by the super-exploitation of labor, i.e. the gap between wages and the value of labor-power. The outcome is an equation that relates positively the magnitude of unpaid housework with the super-exploitation of labor. The parametric and nonparametric regression estimates applied in both countries show preliminary empirical support for the theoretical model. The theoretical and empirical findings have several implications for Marxist-feminist literature as well as for empirical research on unpaid housework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A definition of essential industries based on recent federal government guidelines is used to trace out the trajectory of wages for essential and nonessential sectors over time in the United States. This retrospective approach is justified by the fact that the included industries provide goods and services that are essential to health and safety whether or not emergency conditions exist. Union density has been consistently higher in essential industries, but the percentage of nonunionized workers has also increased more rapidly in those industries. The data show that real wages in essential industries have declined relative to nonessential industries since 1983 and that essential industries have consistently had lower levels of wage inequality than their nonessential counterparts. Regression analyses suggest that uneven de-unionization can explain part of the decline in relative wages. Furthermore, higher rates of union coverage in essential industries likely contribute to their comparatively low levels of wage inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I analyze the impact of the CARES Act unemployment subsidy on US income and inequality in the first month of the COVID-19 crisis using March-April Current Population Survey data. I then use monthly industry unemployment data to extend this panel to July. Next, I estimate the impact of the expiration of the CARES Act subsidy on average income and inequality. Finally, I extend the panel to November to simulate the effects of proposed HEALS and HEROES Acts. I find the CARES Act subsidy was effective at increasing average income above pre-crisis levels and reducing inequality. The expiration of the CARES Act subsidy caused a decrease in average income and increase in inequality relative to pre-crisis levels. I find the proposed HEALS legislation will return inequality to near pre-crisis levels, while the proposed HEROES Act will result in higher income and lower inequality than existed before the crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent empirical research has documented a dramatic change in government's role in regulating employer–employee relations, a collapse in workers' collective action, and low wage growth contributing to rising inequality. To better understand the theoretical connections between these variables, we construct a monopsony-wage-model that integrates intertemporal strategic interaction between workers and employers in the wage setting process into an institutional context. We show that workers' collective action reduces rents to firms. However, workers face multiple obstacles from engaging in collective action. In an environment that does not support workers, as is currently the case, it is maximizing for employees to engage in very little collective action, and, as a result, wage inequality is exacerbated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

De Schutter's conclusions stand in contrast to Bellamy and Kröger's project, according to which the EU would become a fairer institutional arrangement if it allowed for differentiated integration: Differentiated integration (DI) describes an institutional mechanism whereby some member states opt out or are excluded from certain common EU policies for sovereignty or capacity reasons. This should of course not be very surprising given the centrality of "solidarity talk" in both public debates about European integration, and in the EU's official documents (e.g. Articles 2 and 3 of the Treaty of European Union that mention solidarity). Publics across Europe increasingly feel that the European Union (EU) undermines the problem-solving capacities of its member states - particularly in social, welfare, migration, and labour policy - and increases inequality both within and across them. [Extracted from the article]

What does justice require concerning socio-economic distribution among citizens of the European Union? The EU should reduce cross-national economic inequalities among inhabitants of different member states, but full economic distributive equality or a European 'Difference Principle,' may not be required. Individuals' claim to more political influence over matters controlled by their own state in the quasi-federal EU may permit some economic inequality. Section 1 orients this contribution relative to arguments for a European universal income. Section 2 provides relevant features of the EU. Section 3 considers contractualist arguments against certain forms of economic inequality, while section 4 identifies a further argument in favour of equal shares of benefits of social cooperation, based on an interpretation of 'social primary goods' consistent with Rawls' theory. Section 5 argues that these reasons for economic distributive equality must be weighed against more political influence over matters controlled by the individual's sub-unit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent decades, and in particular since the shift towards independent central banks, there has been no explicit coordination of fiscal and monetary policy. In the Eurozone, this lack of coordination represents an important flaw, especially since the Eurozone is not an optimal currency area. Complementing monetary union with a transfer union represents one possible solution. This paper argues that the negative impact of post-2008 and post-Covid-19 unconventional monetary policy on income inequalities provides a second reason to coordinate fiscal and monetary policy. Among various institutional arrangements to implement such coordination, the paper defends the idea that the European Central Bank should be sensitive to distributive considerations when formulating its monetary policy. Such an arrangement would help both to contain the distributive side-effects of monetary policy and to at least partially remedy the flaw at the heart of the Eurozone as long as an outright transfer union remains unfeasible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This note introduces original technical results in the theoretical measurement of inequality by specifying the relationships between additive separability and homotheticity (of measures of welfare closely related to measures of inequality), and decomposability and homogeneity in measures of inequality. More specifically, an interrogation is made of the resonances and dissonances between the classic contributions of Atkinson and Shorrocks, which are key representatives, respectively, of the 'social welfare function' and the 'axiomatic' approaches to measuring inequality. In brief, in the presence of otherwise common assumptions, it is shown that additive separability and homotheticity of welfare are stronger combined conditions than decomposability and homogeneity (of degree zero) of income inequality. The gap between the two, however, can be closed by adding an extra term around total income to the measure of welfare, allowing for wider considerations of the relationship between social welfare, total income, and the distribution of individual incomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between 1980 and 2016 the share of households in the bottom quintile of the income distribution that owned their own home declined by 10 percentage points. For the same households, the share of monthly income spent on rent increased from 28% in 1960 to over 42% in 2016. To asses the extent to which income stagnation is responsible for the decline in affordability, I use Census microdata to construct counterfactual simulations that capture the evolution of housing market trends under alternative assumptions about the distribution of income. Income stagnation explains nearly the entire decline in affordability for the bottom quintile. Housing market frictions that cause the price of housing to deviate from marginal cost matter more to households further up the income distribution. Using Atkinson-type welfare-based inequality measures, I find that the counterfactual distribution of income – with inequality held constant – results in greater welfare for nearly all possible levels of inequality aversion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the evolution of wages and wage inequality in four European countries during the economic crisis in light of important shifts in the occupational structure. Through recentered influence function regression for quantiles of European Union Survey on Income and Living Conditions data, this analysis links research on the primary forces of both wage and wage inequality to the decomposition of their changes between 2005 and 2013 into the composition effect and the wage structure. France and Germany show decreasing wage inequality despite having opposite changes in wages, whereas the United Kingdom and Italy show increasing wage inequality while maintaining opposite changes in wages. The wage structure has a greater influence on generating variation in the real salary, and the composition effect mostly explains the change in wage inequality with varying intensity throughout the distribution. Italy is the only country whose wage structure significantly contributes to wage inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using data from the US Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) National Income and Product Accounts (NIPA) – including a BEA satellite account that imputes monetary values for unwaged household production – this paper provides a feminist, class-based framework for estimating the annual cost of social reproduction in the United States from 1959 to 2012. The key finding is that for US working-class households, the cost of socially reproducing labor-power has risen relative to the cost of employing labor-power, implying that employers are paying for a decreasing proportion of the total societal cost of socially reproducing labor-power. These results are discussed in relationship to growing income inequality and the contradictory role of the state in the US neoliberal era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper hypothesizes that the worldwide market-friendly political/institutional transformations of the early 1980s had an impact on the direction of technological change. Their crucial effect was to make an integrated global labor market politically feasible, which raised demand for what eventually became global value chains and production networks, requiring in turn the further development of IT to lower communication and information costs. IT investment and demand for high skills, driven up by the large set up costs of global networks, eventually stagnated once these networks were in place making the expansion of low-skill employment around the world less dependent on their services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The debate about the effect of corruption on income distribution suffers from a number of problems. The main issues are the use of perception-based measures of corruption, which implicitly favours one side of the debate, and a too narrow conception of agency involved in corruption. By relying on direct and grained evidence of bribery in 106 industrialised and industrialising states, and by appreciating the role of agency on the part of bribers, this article finds support for an emerging view that the effect of corruption on inequality is conditional. Under poor institutional conditions, entrepreneurial-related bribery is associated with an increase in the relative income share of the poorest 40%, mitigating disposable income inequality. The results are robust to the use of different income-distribution measures and data sources, as well as different specifications. While wide-spread bribery and corruption in general may be detrimental to longer term socio-economic progress, it is important not to ignore the incentives and constraints that lead people to use bribery as a means of survival. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the most important economic debates surrounding the feasibility of government efforts to redistribute income is the extent to which economic integration leads to policy convergence. The convergence hypothesis argues that when trade and finance flow freely between political jurisdictions, economic policies will tend to converge. This article uses two Canadian provinces, Manitoba and British Columbia, to conduct a comparative analysis of redistributive policy convergence. We do find observable differences in the redistributive policies of the two provinces. The extent to which this translated into measurable improvements in economic and social outcomes is less pronounced, but will be of interest to scholars of inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the 1990s, social structure of accumulation (SSA) theorists identified the solidification of a neoliberal SSA that included a capital-citizen accord based on 'managing the discontent of the losers'. This created social stability by reconciling working households to material hardships emanating from the neoliberal labour market by means of either coercion or non-economic distraction. This paper argues that there was, in fact, a material basis to the neoliberal capital-citizen accord, including the ability of households to accumulate debt in order to limit the growth of consumption inequality arising from burgeoning income inequality. The material basis of the capital-citizen accord broke down during the financial crisis of 2007–2009, destabilizing the accord itself. The result is that the neoliberal SSA is now threatened by rising populism. The outcomes of this process are highly uncertain – a key characteristic of the periods of inter regnum that separate successful SSAs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Entrepreneurship can offer people control over their working lives. Yet, it has declined among households younger than 50 years and grown among older households. We examine the relationship between growing wealth inequality and this widening entrepreneurial age disparities by focusing on wealth as a source of income diversification. Our main hypothesis is that younger households have less capital income from wealth holdings leading to less diversification as compared to older households. Using descriptive statistics and multinomial logistic regressions based on data from the Federal Reserve's triennial Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF), we conclude that the gap in households' entrepreneurial responsiveness to income diversification has widened by age. We also find that households' capital income receipt follows from wealth such that rising wealth inequality may have impeded income diversification and reduced entrepreneurship among households with less wealth, especially younger ones. We rule out three alternative explanations: increasing economic pressures from labor market instability, tightening of liquidity constraints, and in declines in nonpecuniary rewards – for the divergent entrepreneurship trends. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study is the first attempt at promoting agricultural input subsidy policies in a computable general equilibrium framework on two main dimensions of food security (i.e. food availability and access to food), poverty and income distribution in Malaysia for all ethnic groups. This study investigates the short-run impacts of two subsidy removal policy and one subsidy expansion policy using 2010 input–output table. Results show that both subsidy removal policies negatively influence agricultural sectors and economic growth of Malaysia while the expansion policy influence them positively. The removal policies also decrease food availability and access to food and, consequently, increase poverty at the national level and the poverty level of Malay household, while the expansion policy increases food availability and access to food and alleviate the poverty level of Malay household. The complete removal policy without paddy/rice subsidies increases rice production and raises food availability and access to food commodities (or food security) in the country resulting in a lesser increase in poverty compared to the complete removal policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses a computational framework to analyse the equilibrium dynamics of exploitation and inequality in accumulation economies with heterogeneous labour. A novel index is presented which measures the intensity of exploitation at the individual level and the dynamics of the distribution of exploitation intensity is analysed. Various taxation schemes are analysed which may reduce exploitation or inequalities in income and wealth. It is shown that relatively small taxation rates may have significant cumulative effects on wealth and income inequalities. Further, taxation schemes that eliminate exploitation also reduce disparities in income and wealth but in the presence of heterogeneous skills, do not necessarily eliminate them. The inegalitarian effects of different abilities need to be tackled with a progressive education policy that compensates for unfavourable circumstances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In times of a declining labour share and an intense international tax competition, some form of market socialism may contribute to hold income inequality in check. However, the concept of market socialism involves three major pitfalls: cronyism, technological stagnation, and power concentration. These pitfalls could be avoided by an appropriate institutional design that includes the combination of public ownership with an extensive use of the stock market, an incentive-compatible mechanism for the takeover of private firms, and participatory democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores corporate responsibility for less income inequality within the boundaries of the organization and with regard to society at large. Instead of examining the entire range of income distribution, the focus is on the lower and upper ends. The 'floor' is defined as a living wage, supported by strong economic and ethical arguments and proposed as a minimal income standard that can - and thus should - be implemented by companies. As for the ethically acceptable 'ceiling' of executive compensation, its identification and justification are more complicated. However, strong economic and ethical arguments can be made in favor of a drastic reduction of executive pay. Corporate responsibility for less income inequality in society means, first, to 'walk the talk' and set an example and, second, to being 'a good corporate citizen' by supporting legislation for a living wage and an ethically acceptable ceiling of executive pay. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A key question raised in the social sciences is the mechanism that transforms the uncoordinated behavior of individuals in society into coherent systemic outcomes, and whether these outcomes are socially desirable. Regarding (i), the general equilibrium model focuses on individual producers and individual consumers, but other analyses can examine agents who are both consumers and who specialize in the production of different things. Concerning (ii), the neoclassical model relies on two mechanisms: the responses of individual quantity decisions to prices and price changes due to market conditions. [Extracted from the article]

This paper aims at investigating gender differentials in wages and education from an intergenerational perspective across four developed countries of southern Europe, considering the generational transmission of preferences and the gender equality systems and policies. Measures of gender inequality in wages and education permit exploring the different extent to which gender gaps depend on unobserved factors, such as discrimination. A first set of discrimination indexes is computed starting from the estimation of extended Mincerian log-earnings equations, whereas a second set is based on the estimation of ordered logistic regressions on a range of personal characteristics considered to be linked to education, controlling for family background. The main results show that family background affects the degree of gender inequality more than the gender equality policies do. Gender disparities in professional outcomes can be partly due to women's preferences vs. lower-paid jobs because of the incomplete efficacy of national systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nicholas Vrousalis undertakes the former task, while Korkut Erturk tackles the latter. This special issue of the I Review of Social Economics i is intended to demonstrate, and to partially survey, the state of Marxian theory in the social sciences. Erturk contributes to this project by taking up one of the central mechanisms that sustain employer dominance - the simplification of tasks and the attendant deskilling of labor. [Extracted from the article]

This paper uses General Social Survey data linked to Census data to investigate the effect of local area income and income inequality on worker well-being. Others have found a robust negative correlation between reference group income and self-reported well-being. However, in many cases the reference group is defined as a large geographic area. This paper adds to the literature in two ways. First, it considers multiple nested geographic reference groups with US data. Second, it explicitly considers income inequality in addition to the level of income. It is found that both income and income inequality are positively associated with well-being at the census tract level, but negatively associated at the county level. Further, the effect of inequality on well-being decreases as income increases at the census tract and county level, while it increases at the state level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction to the journal is presented in which the author explores various aspects of minimum wage, which include politics, income inequality, and wage contours.

This paper argues that interest on consumer debt must be taken into account when measuring poverty and inequality. These interest payments cannot be used to support household living standards. This makes middle- and low-income households worse off. Recent increases in consumer debt means that this deterioration in living standards is not captured by conventional government statistics. Using the Survey of Consumer Finances, we make estimates of poverty and inequality that take into account rising interest payments on consumer debt and discuss some of the implications of these estimates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Instead of merely setting a lower bound on the wages of formal sector workers, minimum wages serve as a norm for wage setting more generally throughout the Mexican economy. Our results suggest that wages are commonly set at multiples of the minimum wage, and that changes in minimum wages influence wage changes across the occupational distribution. Moreover, our findings suggest that these normative features of minimum wages have their greatest impact on the mid-to-lower tail of the wage distribution, including the informal sector of the economy. Thus, the results lend support to the view that declining real minimum wages and stabilization programs that strengthened the link between wage levels, wage changes, and minimum wages, might account for a portion of the growing wage inequality in Mexico over the period of the late 1980s and early 1990s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Principles from the social thought of the Indian philosopher P.R. Sarkar are employed to show that there exists an optimal level of economic inequality that joins the values of economic justice and efficiency. Sarkar favored establishing a living wage as well as a maximum wage that allows for work incentives. It is argued that the primary justification for inequality is to provide incentives for individual productivity, and that the value of those incentives should not exceed the economic contributions they produce. To determine the relative importance of income incentives in motivating individual economic contributions, it is found necessary to develop a multifaceted model of human productivity. Such a model is developed using concepts from humanistic psychology. A Sarkarian individual productivity curve is introduced in diagrammatic analysis to demonstrate the existence of an optimal level of inequality, and also to explain the persistence of extreme income inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The first part of this paper reviews five major theoretical approaches that describe the fundamental causes of poverty, with particular attention to what these theories imply about government policy towards markets and the need for immediate poverty alleviation. Different causal theories have very different policy implications; it is difficult to recommend specific anti-poverty policies with making assumptions about the nature of economic markets and of individual behavior. The paper ends with comments about how to make these choices, arguing that the greater moral onus one associates with poverty, the more willing one should be to adopt less efficient strategies that do more to raise incomes among the poor. The interconnections between markets and social and political systems--which often disadvantage poor populations--suggests that some market regulations and targeted programs may be necessary to reduce poverty, especially if these can be implemented with minimal corruption and monitored for effectiveness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although he was much influenced by David Ricardo when he wrote the classical part of his Principles, John Stuart Mill was not a Ricardian when he penned his theories of wealth and distribution. They are based on a triple foundation. First, a belief that economics is a moral discipline. Second a theory of custom-driven human behavior. Third, an empirically formed conviction that the institutions of state, education and business cooperate to structure the distribution of income. On the basis of these presuppositions, Mill formulated 1) an institutional theory of the formation of human and non-human wealth and 2) an even more institutional theory of distribution demonstrating how the aforementioned institutions malignantly skew the distribution of income to the advantage of the propertied classes and to the extreme disadvantage of the working class. As a social economist, Mill recommended institutional reforms designed to eradicate the poverty of the working class. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates the relationship between unequal regional development and racial and gender wage inequality in Brazil. Using sample data from the 1991 Brazilian census, I estimated monthly wages for a white, brown and black women and men working in the states of São Paulo and Bahia. The findings suggest that while women and Afro-Brazilians in Brazil's most developed region of São Paulo had the advantages of higher levels of state sponsored work benefits and more equitable occupational and wage distribution, they nevertheless experienced the greatest discrimination. In contrast, the less developed state of Bahia where racial and gender gaps in education, occupation and wages were the most severe, wage discrimination was lowest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Economic justice is an important subject to be studied by academics. It is also central to public policy debates on such issues as the need for adequate wages, the prevalence of poverty, and the adverse impacts of the globalization of production. Questions of economic justice are fundamentally questions about the ethics of income distribution . This is an introduction to a volume devoted to matters of economic justice. In it, I establish the importance of the subject, briefly describe the six articles in the volume, and present a set of principles and selected suggested readings to guide future discussions and study of economic justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay attempts to show that there is a satisfactory resolution to the long-standing controversy as to the whether poverty is measured strictly in terms of a minimal-living (or absolute) standard or an income-distribution (or relative) standard, a resolution which is based on the duality of human nature. Indeed such a two-dimensional definition of poverty already is in place in Ireland--the first place (it seems) to actually sort out this controversial matter. In that sense, this author's principal concern is with the fourth question raised by this symposium: "What assumptions and definitions underlie your estimates which you believe to be especially important?" This essay is relatively short in length in order to present its central message more forcefully: substantial improvement in the way poverty is officially defined and measured is possible if more careful consideration is given to the reason why poverty is two-dimensional. An Appendix on how poverty is defined and measured in Ireland is attached because the arguments presented in the discourse there are relevant to the discourse on poverty in the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chile's long tradition of welfare programs included ‘generous’ benefits for many working women. The social security system, however, perpetuated significant forms of gender and class inequality. In the 1970s and 1980s, poverty was greatly increased by sweeping market reforms. The military government responded to the high social costs with a minimal safety net which targeted expectant mothers, small children and the extremely poor, but was inadequate for most of the population. After the return of democracy, income distribution has improved in the 1990s. Yet, much needs to be done to promote family well-being through effective and participatory social policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Among the urban poor in the Global South, an increasingly large percentage of women are household heads because weakened kin structures have allowed men to cease supporting their families. Women produce income at home in order to combine work and childcare despite government regulations and community planners that discourage such use. Changes in policies regarding tenancy rights for women, housing design, and home production would recognize a woman's dual use of her home. New organizations for home-based workers offer some measure of protection. Solutions to family survival require a research focus on survival issues relating to men as well as to women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the determinants of the inter-urban variation in black and white intra-racial family income inequality by examining metropolitan area data from the 1990 census. It presents the order of magnitude of income inequality within the black and white populations employing the standard measures of income inequality. It also formulates an empirical model that links intra-racial inequality with racial socioeconomic characteristics and nonracial urban and regional variables. Regression results and significant differences between the black and white models, summary and conclusions are presented.

The economic values which nontraded and traded environmental goods and services, or negative externalities, might be given, depend (in different ways) on the distribution of income. Income-elasticity (in actual or surrogate markets) might be greater for environmental ‘amenities’ than for environmental ‘necessities.’ Therefore, a redistribution of income would have effects on the demand of environmental goods and services. But this is not the main line of this paper, which is more focused on the ‘supply side.’ From the ‘supply side,’ the distribution of income (and of property rights) will determine (in a Sraffian-like manner) the value (or rather, the ‘production prices’) of traded ‘natural capital.’ However, most environmental goods and services are not in the market. In this respect, the paper introduces the concept of ‘ecological distribution,’ i.e. the social, spatial, and temporal asymmetries in the access to natural resources or in the burdens of pollution (whether traded or not), and it considers the relations between economic distribution and ecological distribution. In other words, the paper discusses the relations between Political Economy and Political Ecology. The paper also includes a section on the appropriate discount rate which would be that determined by the ‘sustainable’ productivity of capital; but the measure of sustainability depends on the measure of depreciation of ‘natural capital,’ and the measure of ‘natural capital’ depends on the allocation of property rights, and on the distribution of income. The final section explores the links between distributional issues and economic incommensurability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article investigates why poverty rates for female-headed families are practically higher than those of male-headed families and married-couple families. According to the author, data in the U.S. shown that the poverty rate among female-headed families in the U.S. consistently has been about three times that of male-headed families and about six times that of married-couple families. Possible reasons for the situation is that female-headed families are expected to be dependent on welfare for long periods of time, and that many children are being raised in poverty, which consequently not getting access to the resources needed to enable them to become productive adults. Results and implication of the study conducted are presented.

The outstanding faults of the economic society in which we live are its failure to provide for full employment and its arbitrary and inequitable distribution of wealth and incomes. The bearing of the foregoing theory on the first of these is obvious (Keynes, 1936, p. 372). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article comments on the report entitled "The Extent of Material Hardship and Poverty in the United States," by Robert E. Rector and colleagues that was previously published in "Review of Social Economy" journal. The report focused on difficulties in defining and measuring income and poverty. The author considers that "reporting shortfall" is an incorrect characterization of discrepancy because the income measures are not directly comparable.