Publications
In recent years there has been a surge of interest in the subject of inequality, fuelled by new facts and new thinking. The literature on inequality has expanded rapidly as official data on income, wealth, and other personal information have become richer and more easily accessible. Ideas about the meaning of inequality have expanded to encompass new concepts and different dimensions of economic inequality. The purpose of this chapter is to give a concise overview of the issues that are involved in translating ideas about inequality into practice using various types of data.
In this chapter, we revisit the origins and genesis of the french school of proximity and its evolution trough time, in order to better understand how and why the small group of researchers who were the driving force of this new way of thinking were quickly able to get a real legitimacy and effective recognition. First of all, it was clear that the role of space in economic dynamics was too often the subject of confusion and abusive assertions. Asking this question in terms of coordination made it possible to consider non-spatial factors in the analysis. The notion of proximity as a polysemic concept therefore opened the way to understanding how space matters or not, together with these other factors thus a renewed approach of questions related to space and territories. But, even starting from issues of economic nature, such an approach could not remain limited to its economic dimension, the questions of coordination involving social individuals, located in geographical space but also embedded in bundles of relationships and in institutions. Thus, it had to broaden very quickly to other disciplines in social sciences which largely contributed to consolidate the bases of what became a multidisciplinary approach and to develop theoretical as well as empirical tools.
Ce texte tente de dresser un état des lieux entre les similitudes que présente l’analyse économique des communs d’Elinor Ostrom et la doctrine sociale de l’Eglise (DSE), telle qu’elle s’exprime dans le Compendium et dans les encycliques du Pape François. La destination universelle des biens, avec pour objectif la satisfaction des besoins de l’humanité, est un des principes de la DSE. La réponse économique passe par la production de biens et services privés ou publics. Ostrom enrichit ces réponses à la destination universelle des biens en développant une troisième possibilité, la production par la coopération pour les communs. Par ailleurs, les travaux d’Elinor Ostrom confirment deux principes de la DSE, la participation et la subsidiarité. L’histoire économique montre que la gestion pérenne des communs passe par la participation de tous les agents concernés, participation qui se manifeste dans les décisions collectives et dans le contrôle. Cette participation stimule la qualité et la circulation de l’information, une qualité de la société que souligne l’encyclique Fratelli Tutti. Quant à l’organisation polycentrique qu’Ostrom étudie dans la gestion des nappes d’eau souterraines en Californie au XXème siècle, c’est une mise en valeur du principe de subsidiarité. Cette confrontation fait néanmoins naître des questions, en particulier sur la solidarité qui repose sur le souci du bien commun pour la DSE. Pour Elinor Ostrom, la solidarité repose sur l’intérêt personnel ou du groupe sur la longue période. Ostrom reste dans la logique de la rationalité économique, une vision commune du bien de l’humanité n’est pas nécessaire pour qu’une solidarité se manifeste. Malgré les interrogations qu’elle soulève, la convergence entre l’approche positive des communs et l’approche normative de la DSE est remarquable dans l’histoire de la connaissance.
In this chapter, we revisit the origins and genesis of the french school of proximity and its evolution trough time, in order to better understand how and why the small group of researchers who were the driving force of this new way of thinking were quickly able to get a real legitimacy and effective recognition. First of all, it was clear that the role of space in economic dynamics was too often the subject of confusion and abusive assertions. Asking this question in terms of coordination made it possible to consider non-spatial factors in the analysis. The notion of proximity as a polysemic concept therefore opened the way to understanding how space matters or not, together with these other factors thus a renewed approach of questions related to space and territories. But, even starting from issues of economic nature, such an approach could not remain limited to its economic dimension, the questions of coordination involving social individuals, located in geographical space but also embedded in bundles of relationships and in institutions. Thus, it had to broaden very quickly to other disciplines in social sciences which largely contributed to consolidate the bases of what became a multidisciplinary approach and to develop theoretical as well as empirical tools.
In the case of ordered categorical data, the concepts of minimum and maximum inequality are not straightforward. In this chapter, the authors consider the Cowell and Flachaire (2017) indices of inequality. The authors show that the minimum and maximum inequality depend on preliminary choices made before using these indices, on status and the sensitivity parameter. Specifically, maximum inequality can be given by the distribution which is the most concentrated in the top or bottom category, or by the uniform distribution.
The growth incidence curve of Ravallion and Chen (2003) is based on the quantile function. Its distribution-free estimator behaves erratically with usual sample sizes leading to problems in the tails. The authors propose a series of parametric models in a Bayesian framework. A first solution consists in modeling the underlying income distribution using simple densities for which the quantile function has a closed analytical form. This solution is extended by considering a mixture model for the underlying income distribution. However, in this case, the quantile function is semi-explicit and has to be evaluated numerically. The last solution consists in adjusting directly a functional form for the Lorenz curve and deriving its first-order derivative to find the corresponding quantile function. The authors compare these models by Monte Carlo simulations and using UK data from the Family Expenditure Survey. The authors devote a particular attention to the analysis of subgroups.
This paper proposes new estimates of potential growth for 5 major industrialized countries. We use a state-space approach to obtain joint estimates of potential growth and the natural interest rates. The model is a reduced-form of a partial equilibrium model with a Phillips curve and an IS curve. In addition to the usual determinants of prices and business fluctuations, we consider financial variables as a determinant of the business cycle.
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