Inequality, Welfare and Monotonicity
Yoram Amiel and Frank A Cowell
Published April 1997
We establish a general relationship between the standard form of the individualistic social-welfare function and the ?reduced-form? version that is expressed in terms of inequality and mean income. This shows the relationship between the property of monotonicity and the slope of the equity-efficiency trade-off. Particularly simple results are available for a large class of inequality measures that includes the Gini. These results do not require differentiability of the social welfare function.
Paper Number DARP 029:
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