Assessing the Distributional Impact of Public Policy

Economic development necessarily changes the welfare of socioeconomic groups to various degrees, depending on differences in their social arrangements. The challenge for policymakers is to select the changes that will be most socially desirable. Th...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author:	Essama-Nssah, B.
Format:	Policy Research Working Paper
Language:	English en_US
Published:	World Bank, Washington, DC 2014
Subjects:	PUBLIC POLICY EVALUATION DISTRIBUTIONAL IMPACT ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT WELFARE ECONOMICS SOCIOECONOMIC CONDITIONS SOCIAL IMPACT ASSESSMENT HOUSEHOLD SURVEYS POVERTY INDEX INEQUITY GINI COEFFICIENT POVERTY INCIDENCE COMMODITY TAXATION POLICY PLANNING SOCIAL WELFARE COMPUTERIZATION AVAILABLE DATA BENCHMARK BETWEEN-GROUP INEQUALITY CUMULATIVE DISTRIBUTION FUNCTION DATA SET DATA SETS DECREASING FUNCTION DEVELOPING WORLD DEVELOPMENT GOALS DEVELOPMENT INSTITUTION DISTRIBUTION FUNCTIONS DISTRIBUTIONAL ANALYSIS ECONOMETRIC ANALYSIS ECONOMIC MANAGEMENT ELASTICITY EQUAL WEIGHT FACTOR COMPONENTS GROUP INEQUALITY HOUSEHOLD EXPENDITURES HOUSEHOLD LEVEL HOUSEHOLD SIZE HOUSEHOLD SURVEY HOUSEHOLD SURVEY DATA IMPACT ANALYSIS INCOME INCOME ELASTICITY INCOME HOUSEHOLDS INCOME INEQUALITY INCOME SHARE INEQUALITY INEQUALITY INDICATORS LIVING STANDARD LORENZ CURVE POLICY ANALYSIS POLICY OPTIONS POLICY RESEARCH POLICY STATEMENT POOR GROUP POPULATION SHARE POVERTY ANALYSIS POVERTY ASSESSMENT POVERTY ERADICATION POVERTY IMPACT POVERTY INDICES POVERTY LINE POVERTY REDUCTION POVERTY REDUCTION STRATEGY POVERTY STATUS PROGRAMS PUBLIC POLICY SERIES DATA SOCIAL EXCLUSION SOCIAL JUSTICE SOCIAL PROGRESS STATISTICAL OFFICE TAXATION TIME SERIES VALUATION VALUE JUDGMENTS WELL-BEING
Online Access:	http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/2002/09/2016298/assessing-distributional-impact-public-policy http://hdl.handle.net/10986/19279

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Summary:	Economic development necessarily changes the welfare of socioeconomic groups to various degrees, depending on differences in their social arrangements. The challenge for policymakers is to select the changes that will be most socially desirable. The author demonstrates the usefulness of distributional analysis for social evaluation and, more specifically, for welfare evaluation, using data from the 1994 Integrated Household Survey in Guinea. Because the international community has declared poverty eradication a fundamental objective of development, the author uses a poverty-focused approach to social evaluation based on the maximum principle. This principle offers a unifying framework for analyzing the socioeconomic impact of public policy by using a wide variety of evaluation functions, inequality indicators (like the extended Gini coefficient), and poverty indices (such as Sen's index and the members of the Foster-Greer-Thorbecke family). The author also examines, within the context of commodity taxation, how to identify socially desirable policy options using both the dominance criterion and abbreviated social welfare functions. He includes computer routines for calculating various welfare indices and for plotting the relevant concentration curves.

Assessing the Distributional Impact of Public Policy

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