Journal article
The median versus inequality-adjusted GNI as core indicator of 'ordinary' household living standards in rich countries
- Abstract:
- This paper first highlights the extent to which national income per head will be unreliable as an indicator of household income change over time around the middle for rich countries, in the short or long run, and will mislead as to the relative performance of countries in achieving broadly-based improvements in prosperity. It then demonstrates that ‘inequality-adjusting’ national income will not suffice to bridge the gap. The divergence between the trajectory of median household income and GDP/GNI per capita is due to a variety of factors that themselves vary in significance across countries and over time, with the distribution of the gains from growth being only one. Median income thus needs to be accorded a central role alongside GDP per capita in both official monitoring of living standards and research on inclusive growth. Growth in median incomes will not be a reliable measure of what is happening to the incomes of the poor, though, so low incomes and poverty certainly need to be separately monitored and analysed: one cannot assume that growth that transmits to the middle is also going towards the bottom.
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Peer reviewed
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(Preview, Version of record, 571.8KB, Terms of use)
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- Publisher copy:
- 10.1007/s11205-020-02311-0
Authors
- Publisher:
- Springer
- Journal:
- Social Indicators Research More from this journal
- Volume:
- 150
- Issue:
- 2
- Pages:
- 569-585
- Publication date:
- 2020-03-17
- Acceptance date:
- 2020-03-08
- DOI:
- EISSN:
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1573-0921
- ISSN:
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0303-8300
- Language:
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English
- Keywords:
- Pubs id:
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1096692
- Local pid:
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pubs:1096692
- Deposit date:
-
2021-03-09
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- Brian Nolan.
- Copyright date:
- 2020
- Rights statement:
- ©2020, The Author(s) Open Access. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
- Licence:
- CC Attribution (CC BY)
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