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How is migration related to informal activities? They may be complementary since new migrants may have difficulty finding employment in formal work, so many of them end up informally employed. Alternatively, migration and informality may be substitutes since migrants’ incomes in their new locations and income earned in the home informal economy (without migration) are an imperfect trade-off. Tajikistan possesses both a very large informal sector and extensive international emigration. Using the gap between household expenditure and income as an indicator of informal activity, we find negative significant correlations between informal activities and migration: the gap between expenditure and income falls in the presence of migration. Furthermore, Tajikistan's professional workers’ ability to engage in informal activities enables them to forgo migration, while low-skilled nonprofessionals without postsecondary education choose to migrate instead of working in the informal sector. Our empirical evidence suggests migration and informality substitute for one another.

Responses to minimum income and minimum spending questions are used to produce economic well-being thresholds. Thresholds are estimated using a regression framework. Regression coefficients are based on U.S. Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) data and then applied to U.S. Consumer Expenditure Survey (CE) data. Three different resource measures are compared to the estimated thresholds. The first resource measure is total before-tax money income, and the other two are expenditure based. The first of these two refers to expenditure outlays and the second to outlays adjusted for the value of the service flow of owner-occupied housing (rental equivalence). The income comparison is based on SIPP data while the outlays comparisons are based on CE data. Results using official poverty thresholds are shown for comparison. This is among the earliest work in the U.S. in which expenditure outlays have been used for economic well-being determinations in combination with personal assessments, and the first time rental equivalence has been used in such an exercise. Comparisons of expenditures for various bundles of commodities are compared to the CE derived thresholds to provide insight concerning what might be considered minimum or basic.

Results reveal that CE and SIPP MIQ thresholds are higher than MSQ thresholds, and resulting poverty rates are also higher with the MIQ. CE-based MSQ thresholds are not statistically different from average expenditure outlays for food, apparel, and shelter and utilities for primary residences. When reported rental equivalences for primary residences that are owner occupied are substituted for out-of-pocket shelter expenditures, single elderly are less likely to be as badly off as they would be with a strict outlays approach in defining resources.

The fundamental problem of designing a wide scope general revenue tax can be reduced to the selection of the base used for administering the tax. Our current personal income tax is a hybrid version of a tax assessed on the basis of a tax unit's annual income receipts. An alternative to an income‐based tax that has received much theoretical treatment but little actual application is an expenditure‐based tax. An expenditure tax (also called a consumption tax or cash flow tax in the context of this paper) differs from an income tax in that it exempts net saving and investment from the tax base. Though the details of a consumption tax design are discussed more fully elsewhere in this paper, the tax base of an expenditure tax is roughly determined by subtracting net savings from gross receipts (including wages, tips, salaries, income from investments, interests, etc.). Withdrawals from savings constitute dissavings and are appropriately included in net savings. The cash flow tax, with wealth transfers deductible to the donor and included in the tax base of the recipient, would be a tax on an individual's standard of living. Similar to the present income tax standard deduction, some universal credit or exemption for a small level of consumption could be allowed.

This paper aims to re-examine the impact of government expenditure on income inequality. Existing studies provide mixed results on whether government expenditure reduces or increases income inequality. In this paper, government expenditure is viewed as a tool for redistribution, hence, its impact on inequality is examined.

A sample of 122 countries with 91 and 31 countries categorized as developing and developed countries is used. The dynamic panel threshold regression is used to examine the impact of government expenditure on income inequality and to estimate the turning point of the negative or positive effects.

The major findings suggest that, in general, government expenditure does reduce income inequality. Results from developed countries support the inversed U-shaped Kuznet curve where higher government expenditure initially led to more inequality but would eventually bring about a positive effect after a certain threshold level. For developing countries, education and development expenditure were the driving forces towards lower income inequality.

Several policy implications can be derived from this paper. First, government expenditure is a useful tool to alleviate the problem of income inequality. More integration with the global economy via trading activities is also an important channel to help reduce income inequality. Finally, better institutional quality provides an effective ecosystem in promoting better redistribution of income via government expenditure.

This paper presents a maiden attempt to estimate a threshold value or when government expenditure starts to reduce or increase income inequality. The sample is segregated into developed and developing countries to further control the effect of government size and the level of development of a country.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the housing improvement expenditure as a consumption smoothing strategy for Japanese households.

Tobit estimation method is used to empirically investigate the role of home improvement expenditure in smoothing consumption for households in Japan using data from Japan Housing Demand Survey for 2003.

Findings suggest that: households in Japan use home improvement expenditure to adjust fluctuation in income. Income-constrained elderly households reduce their housing consumption by not improving their homes ceteris paribus in order to maintain their consumption levels. The mortgage repayment burden also plays an important role in home improvement expenditure decisions.

An implication of the analysis is that households who do not own houses may require policy intervention to maintain their welfare. Policies such as subsidies for renters in Japan need to be devised which will provide renters opportunities to smooth consumption. Further, reduction in home improvement expenditure leads to deterioration of quality of housing stock if economic downturn persists longer. This suggests that policies such as tax reduction, tax allowance or tax credit to bolster home improvement behaviour are needed during economic downturn to sustain quality of housing stock.

The paper contributes to the limited literature on the role of home improvement expenditure as a consumption smoothing instrument for households. Those who do not own houses are constrained in maintaining their welfare during downturn. Findings are important for policy makers and paper makes some suggestions in this regard.

When the factors affecting health expenditures are examined in the literature, it is seen that one of the most important factors is income. In this context, the purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship between out-of-pocket health expenditures and disposable personal income and revealing the income elasticity of health expenditures.

Therefore, short/long-term coefficients were obtained by analyzing Westerlund (2007) co-integration analysis and pooled mean group (PMG) regression methods for 22 European Union (EU) member states during the period 2003–2017. In addition, a comparison of the long-term coefficients for each country was obtained with augmented mean group (AMG) estimator.

The results of the AMG and PMG tests show that the long-term coefficients between disposable personal income and health expenditures are 0.83 and 0.97, respectively. These results imply that there is a significant relationship between the variables, and that health care should be categorized in the group of normal goods. However, the fact that the long-term coefficient is very close to 1, despite being classified in the category of necessity goods, requires more care to be taken in evaluating whether health services are luxury goods or necessity goods.

The use of second generation econometric tests on both cross-sectional dependence and heterogeneity demonstrates the value of the study. On the other hand, obtaining similar results by investigating the relationship between variables using different appropriate econometric models reveals the importance of the methodology used in this study. It reveals important details in terms of the literature regarding the long-term and short-term results obtained in this study.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the impacts of large income and expenditure shocks on household food expenditures and determines whether the impacts of large shocks differ among households, especially low-income households.

The study’s data are drawn from a household survey conducted in rural China. Multivariate analysis examines the impacts of large income and expenditure shocks on food expenditures.

The impacts of large positive income shocks on food expenditure are moderate. However, households reduce their per capita food expenditures within a range of about 25-30 percent after suffering large negative shocks. The greatest impact is found for shocks where expenditures more than double, followed by the impact of shocks where income declines by more than half. Moreover, food expenditures among low-income households are much more sensitive to large negative income and expenditure shocks. The paper concludes with policy implications.

This is the first Chinese study to empirically examine the impacts of different income and expenditure shocks on household food expenditures. The results have important implications for smoothing households’ food consumption after they suffer from shocks.

The study aims to determine whether there is a bidirectional causality relationship between health expenditures and per capita income in Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa and Turkey (BRICS+T).

For that purpose, the 2000–2018 period data of the variables were tested with the Kónya (2006) panel causality test. Additionally, the causality relationships between public and private health expenditures and per capita income were also investigated in the study.

According to the analysis results, there is no statistically significant causality relationship from total health expenditures and public health expenditures to per capita income in the relevant countries. Besides, there is a unidirectional causality relationship from private health expenditures to per capita income only in Turkey. On the other hand, a unidirectional causality relationship from per capita income to total health expenditures in China, Russia, Turkey and South Africa and from per capita income to public health expenditures in India, Russia, Turkey and South Africa were determined. Consequently, a causality relationship from per capita income to private health expenditures was found out in Russia and Turkey.

The variables are tested for the first time for BRICS+T countries, vis-à-vis the period under consideration and the method used.

The growth of telecommunications spending is the single most vital factor for continuity of the virtuous circle in the overall information communications technology (ICT) industry. This article aims to attempt to gauge the future telecommunications expenditure potential of Korean households by adopting the Kuznets curve which considers the income turning point.

This study begins by examining the structural pattern of household telecommunications expenditures, and then analyzes them using the fully modified least squares estimation method. Household survey raw data collected on a quarterly basis between 1982 and 2005 were used.

The paper finds that the Korean telecommunication market has grown at a high pace and adopted new technologies quickly. Most previous studies on the Korean telecommunication market have predicted that growth will continue on the basis of the past trend of continuous growth in consumer communications service expenditure, and the technological innovations which have rapidly taken place in the industry over recent years. However, the research paper finds various interesting points that contradict the prediction.

The main research limitation is the range of telecommunication expenditures. The main idea was to examine the relationship between household income and communications expenditure based on the concept of Kuznets hypotheses and to calculate an income turning point to measure spending potential.

The case of Korea offers implications for other countries that are putting in special efforts to manage the telecommunications service market.

The Kuznets hypotheses have never before been utilized in gauging consumers' expenditure potential in the ICT industry, and therefore the process and results discussed in this paper can be classed as pioneering.