Demographic Transition, Family Structure, and Income Inequality

C. Y. Cyrus Chu; Lily Jiang

doi:10.1162/003465397557079

← Search

Demographic Transition, Family Structure, and Income Inequality

C. Y. Cyrus Chu¹; Lily Jiang²

¹ National Taiwan University · ² Tamkang University

The Review of Economics and Statistics 1997

We treat each age-specific income-earning member of the family as an income “source,” and use the source-specific Gini decomposition approach as well as the Lorenz comparison approach to study the impact of the changing population age structure on family income inequality. Empirical analysis using Taiwanese data shows that the pattern of Gini coefficients is significantly affected by the above-mentioned age composition factor. The general implication is that for many developing countries which have recently gone through rapid demographic transition, family income inequality indexed may implicitly embody information as to the age-specific composition of family members, which is irrelevant to the general notion of inequality.

DOI: 10.1162/003465397557079
Volume: 79 (4)
Pages: 665-669
Language: en
Export: BibTeX
Sources: openalex crossref