Abstract

The workshop will be composed of two parts: the first will focus on the use of household expenditure data for welfare analysis, and the second will survey recent methods for analysing inequality, poverty and welfare dominance relations. In considering the use of household expenditure information for welfare analysis, the presentation will cover conceptual and practical issues in analysing expenditure data, along with key features of survey design, survey accuracy, and recent innovations in data collection. The second component of the workshop will survey recent research on robust methods for assessing dominance relations across distributions of consumption (and income or wealth). Specifically, nonparametric methods for testing poverty, Lorenz and stochastic dominance relations will be surveyed. The methods will illustrated with applications based on contemporary household expenditure data.

Professor Garry Barret, is a visiting scholar at LISER and a full professor of economics in the School of Economics at the University of Sydney. Professor Barrett's fields of research include labour economics, econometrics, welfare economics and public policy. His work specializes on human capital, wages and employment, inequality and poverty. Professor Barret is a member of several research committees, and serves as a consultant for several government agencies. He is also editor and referee of a number of economic journals and the Australian Research council.