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Two commonly used sources of aggregate expenditure data are personal consumption expenditures in the National Income an d Product Accounts and the Consumer Expenditure Surveys administered by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The author adjusts b oth data sources to incorporate the service flows from owner-occupied housing and other consumer durables. A comparison of the two estimat es of aggregate expenditure reveals that the differences between the tw o data sets have been growing over time. By 1989 the level of aggregat e expenditure in the national accounts exceeds that reported in the Consumer Expenditure Surveys by $1224 billions. Less than half of th is difference can be attributed to definitional differences in the two data sources.

An alternative approach to the measurement of horizontal inequality is developed. This measure of inequality is based on an explicit social welfare function which is formulated so as to be consistent with the basic principles of social choice. The arguments of the social welfare function are welfare functions that depend on prices, total expenditure and the demographic composition of the household. The level of horizontal inequality is defined to be the difference between the level of social welfare attained at a perfect horizontally egalitarian distribution of welfare and the level of social welfare attained at the existing distribution of individual welfare. The level of horizontal inequality induced by the introduction of commodity taxes is evaluated for the United States over the period 1947-85.

Specific egalitarianism calls for the equalization in the consumption of specific commodities and is a guiding principle of redistributional policy in the United States. It is therefore of interest to evaluate the impact of specific egalitarianism on general egalitarian measures of inequality. For this purpose, multidimensional measures of welfare inequality are disaggregated into subindexes of inequality defined over the distributions of components of individual welfare. The welfare components are taken to be subutility functions identified through the two stage budgeting process. The effect of eliminating inequality in the distribution of a specific welfare component on total welfare inequality is examined for the United States.

A new approach to the measurement of welfare distributional change and social mobility is developed. The novel feature of this model is the use of price dependent measures of individual and social welfare in evaluating t he magnitude and direction of the movement in the distribution. In addition, the proposed indexes of mobility are decomposed into the sum of between-group and w ithin-group mobility. Each measure is implemented for the United States over the period 1947-1982. It is found that in each year society is upwardly mobile rela tive to the 1947 distribution.

Malthusian theory asserts that high population growth in poor countries retards economic development. 2 authors Simon and Pilarski have recently challenged this theory on the basis of their own research; it is their contention that previous studies of population growth and education (1 of the principal modes by which the Malthusian mechanism is assumed to operate) have been flawed. The defect is felt to lie in the assumption of simple rather than partial associations of the 2 variables education and population growth. On the basis of their tightened specifications they have found demographic variables to be nonsignificant in explaining educational expenditures per child once other relevant regressors have been introduced. Similarly little effect of the demographic variable on primary and tertiary school enrollment rates were found although an effect for secondary school enrollment rates was found. On examination of the theoretical framework and the several explanatory variables however the author concludes that a crucial variable which is sure to have a vital bearing on the conclusions reached has been misspecified in the equations. Further the author asserts that a more thorough specification of the tests of the hypothesis (i.e. that high population growth retards educational investment) actually provides additional support for the Malthusian conclusion on educational expenditures despite unpromising initial indications.