Abstract
This quotation is from a study of income distribution over time. Even for a simple economy, measuring the distribution of economic gain is very difficult; for a large, developed, mixed economy, in which both public and private sectors exert their influences on income distribution, the complications of measuring distribution patterns are endless. The study from which the quotation is taken is of income distribution in the UK and covers a period during which there were major structural changes to the economy, several exogenous shocks (including the oil price hike of the early 1970s) and major social and political upheavals, including three changes of government. Nevertheless, as the quotation underlines, if we are interested in measuring economic welfare, and its tendency to change over time, we must take account of the distribution of the gains from economic processes no matter how complicated or dynamic they may be.
Even at the crudest level no assessment of the well-being of a society can have much credibility unless it takes some account of the distribution of income as well as its aggregate total (Morris and Preston, 1986).
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© 1992 Paul Marshall
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Marshall, P. (1992). Welfare: Inequality and Poverty. In: Curwen, P. (eds) Understanding the UK Economy. Macmillan Texts in Economics. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-22278-0_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-22278-0_10
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