Non-anonymous Growth Incidence Curves, Income Mobility and Social Welfare Dominance : a theoretical framework with an application to the Global Economy

The distributional incidence of growth is generally analyzed by comparing the quantiles of the pre- and post-growth income distribution -e.g. the so-called Growth Incidence Curves. Such an approach based on an implicit re-ranking of individual incomes ignores income mobility by assuming that only post-growth income matters in social welfare. By contrast, this paper takes the view that "status quo matters" and that social welfare should logically be defined on both inital and terminal income. This leads to consider 'non-anonymous' Growth Incidence Curves that plot income growth rates against the various quantiles of the initial distribution. Dominance criteria that generalize those available for standard growth incidence curves are derived, which account for the inequality of individual income growth rates, conditional on initial income. An application to the cross-country distributional feature of global growth illustrates the analysis.

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Source https://shs.hal.science/halshs-00966324
Author Bourguignon, François
Maintainer CCSD
Last Updated May 5, 2026, 20:29 (UTC)
Created May 5, 2026, 20:29 (UTC)
Identifier halshs-00966324
Language en
Rights https://about.hal.science/hal-authorisation-v1/
contributor Paris-Jourdan Sciences Economiques (PSE) ; École normale supérieure - Paris (ENS-PSL) ; Université Paris Sciences et Lettres (PSL)-Université Paris Sciences et Lettres (PSL)-Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique (INRA)-École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS)-École nationale des ponts et chaussées (ENPC)-Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS)
creator Bourguignon, François
date 2010-03-05T00:00:00
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harvest_source_id 3374d638-d20b-4672-ba96-a23232d55657
harvest_source_title test moissonnage SELUNE
metadata_modified 2025-10-01T00:00:00
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