Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-g7gxr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-05T16:19:26.055Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

7 - Demographic aspects of the size distribution of income: an exploratory essay

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 November 2009

Get access

Summary

Introduction

This essay is a substantial revision of a paper written in 1974 for a seminar dealing with income distribution, employment, and economic development in Southeast and East Asia. The issues raised in the original paper, while seriously complicating the analysis of income inequalities and of their connection with economic growth, seemed to me sufficiently important and illuminating to merit restatement for better understanding and wider consideration

The issues, to put them briefly, are that in a meaningful distribution of income by size the recipient unit has to be a family or household and cannot be a person; that families or households differ substantially in size, as judged by the number of members, either in productive or younger and older ages; that, consequently, the conventional distributions of income among families or households by income per family or household make little sense, since they are affected by changing or different inequalities among families or households by size; that, even after size distributions by income per family or household are converted into distributions of persons by family or household income per person, they still reflect differences in the age of the household head (hereafter “age of head”), in the phases in the lifetime span of a family's income, which obscure our view of the differences in the longer, or lifetime, level of income.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1989

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×