Inequality

Angus Deaton said he didn’t mind poverty analysis as long as the poverty line is infinity.  Stevenson and Wolfers (2013) assemble the array of survey based measures of subjective well- being (SWB), such as “life satisfaction” or “happiness” and search for income sa...

In an op-ed last week, “Reading Piketty in India,” I noted how poor the U.S. was in the mid-19th century. As best I can determine from the data available, the proportion of America’s population living below India’s poverty line was roughly as high then as it is in India ...

Last week saw the release of the new 2011 Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) rates for GDP produced by the International Comparison Program (ICP). The ICP is a major global statistical operation. The Global Office is housed in the World Bank but the ICP is implemented separately in each region by designa...

A set of more or less arbitrary lines continues to do very strange things to discussions about development.