How can a society’s well-being be measured to include not only average incomes but also
their distribution? How can the effects of policies be assessed by considering both equity and
efficiency? This primer outlines the seminal contributions of influential economists of the
past, including Arthur Okun, who developed a simple method to elicit people’s preferences
regarding redistribution, and Anthony Atkinson, who showed how equity and efficiency can
be measured simultaneously and summarized in a single, intuitive index expressed in
monetary units (such as dollars). These methods are applied to recent data to gauge how
countries fare when both mean incomes and their distribution are considered together, and to
a hypothetical tax-and-transfer scheme assessed through a general equilibrium model for
household-level data.
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