Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface by Louis Galambos and Robert Gallman
- Foreword by Richard A. Easterlin
- 1 Driving forces of economic growth: what can we learn from history?
- 2 A note on production structure and aggregate growth
- 3 The pattern of shift of labor force from agriculture, 1950–70
- 4 Modern economic growth and the less developed countries
- 5 Notes on demographic change
- 6 Recent population trends in less developed countries and implications for internal income inequality
- 7 Demographic aspects of the size distribution of income: an exploratory essay
- 8 Size and age structure of family households: exploratory comparisons
- 9 Size of households and income disparities
- 10 Distributions of households by size: differences and trends
- 11 Children and adults in the income distribution
- Afterword: Some notes on the scientific methods of Simon Kuznets by Robert William Fogel
- Bibliography of Simon Kuznets
- Index
7 - Demographic aspects of the size distribution of income: an exploratory essay
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 November 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface by Louis Galambos and Robert Gallman
- Foreword by Richard A. Easterlin
- 1 Driving forces of economic growth: what can we learn from history?
- 2 A note on production structure and aggregate growth
- 3 The pattern of shift of labor force from agriculture, 1950–70
- 4 Modern economic growth and the less developed countries
- 5 Notes on demographic change
- 6 Recent population trends in less developed countries and implications for internal income inequality
- 7 Demographic aspects of the size distribution of income: an exploratory essay
- 8 Size and age structure of family households: exploratory comparisons
- 9 Size of households and income disparities
- 10 Distributions of households by size: differences and trends
- 11 Children and adults in the income distribution
- Afterword: Some notes on the scientific methods of Simon Kuznets by Robert William Fogel
- Bibliography of Simon Kuznets
- Index
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.
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- Economic Development, the Family, and Income DistributionSelected Essays, pp. 131 - 239Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1989