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Volume 16 of Research on Economic Inequality contains a selection of papers from the Second Biannual Meeting of the Society for the Study of Economic Inequality, Berlin, July 2007. The volume opens with an essay on equal liberties by Serge-Christophe Kolm and is followed by papers on the equality of opportunity, inequality measurement issues, and an applications section.

The relevant basic principle for overall distribution in macrojustice turns out to be the relevant equality of liberties. This study shows the consequence of this fact for the optimum distribution, taxation, and transfers of income. The liberties in question are social liberty (freedom from forceful interference, basic rights), and the possibilities offered by domains of choice which can provide equal liberty while being different for individuals with different productivities.

The method is deductive from the basic relevant concepts.

The result is that this distribution consists of an equal sharing of the proceeds of the same labour for all individuals (with their different productivities). The individuals choose freely their total labour (with no other tax). This redistributive structure is Equal-Labour Income Equalization or ELIE. It also has a number of other important meanings, such as: general balanced labour reciprocity (each yields to each other the proceeds of the same labour); equal basic universal income financed by an equal labour of all; and uniform linear concentration to the mean of the distribution of total incomes (including the value of leisure).

This result extends to multidimensional labour (duration, education, intensity, etc.), and to partial labour including unemployments.

The practical application relies on exemption of overtime labour from the income tax, and a tax credit. This is successfully applied in some countries.

This constitutes a new paradigm of optimum income distribution and taxation. The old paradigm was based on welfarism not found relevant by society for this application, and it has therefore never been applied.

Based on ethnographic data and a textual analysis, this chapter highlights the process of “therapization” of Buddhism in Western countries, with a specific emphasis on Tibetan Buddhism in France. Referring to the paradigm of “political economy of health”, as developed in recent medical anthropology, it attempts to explore the relationships between two concepts – economics and health – that had previously been considered separately, in the context of Western Buddhism. Further, this chapter's aim is to expose a potential application of theoretical economic models in an anthropological approach of Buddhist diffusion and appropriation in the West.

In this paper we show how the Kolm triangle method, which is a standard tool for visualizing allocations in a public good economy, can also be used to provide a diagrammatical exposition of matching mechanisms and their effects on public good supply and welfare. In particular, we describe, on the one hand, for which income distributions interior matching equilibria result, and on the other hand, for which income distributions the agents voluntarily participate in a matching mechanism. As a novel result, we especially show that the “participation zone” is larger than the “interiority zone”

We employ the Kolm triangle approach, which has – compared to most other graphical methods for representing allocations in a public good economy – the advantage that it allows for showing the aggregate budget constraint, the levels of considered agents' private consumption, and the level of public good supply directly in the same diagram.

The Kolm triangle method can be used to visualize important effects of matching in an elegant way, so basically the increase of public good supply through matching. The interiority of matching depends on the income distribution and especially, on how the “interiority zone” is shrinking when the matching rate increases. Moreover, we were able to delimit the “participation zone” in the Kolm triangle. An important and novel insight is that the participation zone is larger than the interiority zone, which means that also corner matching equilibria in which only one agent makes a positive flat contribution to the public good may make both considered agents better off.

Corner matching equilibria in which only one agent makes a positive flat contribution to the public good may improve all considered agents' welfare. How this welfare effect can be generalized to the case of different utility functions and matching rates will be an issue of future research.

The examined matching mechanism finds application in many policy fields where public good undersupply is pending. International climate policy is one of these fields of application, for example.

The Kolm triangle method has been particularly helpful to describe the Nash equilibrium in the case of non-cooperative public good provision and to compare this outcome with Pareto efficient public good allocations. Furthermore, the Kolm triangle approach facilitates the analysis of mechanisms for attaining an efficient public good allocation like the Lindahl equilibrium as well as the study of preconditions and limitations faced by such mechanisms. An important and novel insight of our study is that the participation zone is larger than the interiority zone.

In a recent paper entitled “On Lateral Thinking,” Atkinson (2011) argued that Economics has benefited not only from borrowing ideas from other disciplines such as physics (e.g., Samuelson's Foundations of Economic Analysis, 1947) or psychology (e.g., the growing importance of behavioral economics) but also from applying ideas that appeared in one subfield of Economics to another domain of Economics. As examples of such a cross-fertilization, Atkinson cites duality theory where cost functions were applied to consumer theory or Harberger's (1962) model of tax incidence that was borrowed from international trade theory. Atkinson in fact cited a sentence from his famous 1970 (Atkinson, 1970) article: “My interest in the question of measuring inequality was originally stimulated by reading an early version of the paper by Rotschild and Stiglitz (1970, 1971)” The same parallelism between uncertainty and inequality had been drawn previously by Serge Kolm in his well-known presentation at the meeting of the International Economic Association in Biarritz, France (see Kolm, 1969), which was inspired by his previous work on uncertainty (Kolm, 1966). Atkinson, however, stressed also the need for care in drawing parallels.

Discusses the concept of “relational goods”, defined as intangible capital assets that inhere in enduring interpersonal relationships and provide both intrinsic and instrumental benefits. They are local public goods that are formed or maintained through non‐contractible, co‐ordinated actions. Presents a simple model of investment in exogenously formed two‐person relationships and discusses the model under different assumptions as to agents’ homogeneity, pair formation and type observability. Discusses the possibility of endogenous type change and interprets it in terms of the evolution of cultural attitudes towards such a peculiar and fragile asset, as are relationships.

We propose a framework for the measurement of income mobility over several time periods, based on the notion that multi-period mobility amounts to measuring the degree of association between the individuals and the time periods. More precisely we compare the actual income share of individuals at a given time in the total income of all individuals over the whole period analyzed, with their “expected” share, assumed to be equal to the hypothetical income share in the total income of society over the whole accounting period that an individual would have had at a given time, had there been complete independence between the individuals and the time periods. We then show that an appropriate way of consistently measuring multi-period mobility should focus on the absolute rather than the traditional (relative) Lorenz curve and that the relevant variable to be accumulated should be the difference between the “a priori” and “a posteriori” shares previously defined. Moving from an ordinal to a cardinal approach to measuring multi-period mobility, we then propose classes of mobility indices based on absolute inequality indices. We illustrate our approach with an empirical application using the EU-SILC rotating panel dataset. Our empirical analysis seems to vindicate our approach because it clearly shows that income mobility was higher in the new EU countries (those that joined the EU in 2004 and later). We also observe that income mobility after 2008 was higher in three countries that were particularly affected by the financial crisis: Greece, Portugal, and Spain.