On the measurement of plutonomy

Paul Makdissi () and Myra Yazbeck ()

Social Choice and Welfare, 2015, vol. 44, issue 4, 703-717

Abstract: Recently, a lot of attention is given to income variations occurring at the top of the income distribution. “What happens to the top 1 %?” is a question of crucial importance on the political level (Occupy Wall Street Movement) as well as on income inequality measurement level. Despite this increased interest, there is no rigorous measurement framework available in the literature for the measurement of plutonomy or “what happens to the top 1 %”. To fill this gap, this paper proposes a simple framework for the measurement of plutonomy. It exposes the ethical principles underlying plutonomy indices and develops restricted Lorenz dominance conditions that produce robust orderings of plutonomy between income distributions. Finally, the paper offers a brief empirical illustration using the World Top Incomes Database. Copyright Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2015

Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s00355-014-0857-0 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:spr:sochwe:v:44:y:2015:i:4:p:703-717

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... c+theory/journal/355

DOI: 10.1007/s00355-014-0857-0

Access Statistics for this article

Social Choice and Welfare is currently edited by Bhaskar Dutta, Marc Fleurbaey, Elizabeth Maggie Penn and Clemens Puppe

More articles in Social Choice and Welfare from Springer, The Society for Social Choice and Welfare Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().