Level Of Total Income Research Articles

Intra Household Allocation of Consumption: A Model and Some Evidence from French Data

The goal of this paper is twofold. First, we reproduce upon French data previous tests of the so-called hypothesis, a conse quence of traditional models of household behaviour according to which only total income-and not income distribution across members-should matter. We find that income pooling is rejected: for a given level of total income, the share of husband's and wife's own income significantly affects the structure of consumption. Our second purpose is more innovative. We construct a theoretical model of collective decision making, based upon the efficiency assumption of collective decision making. Both our setting and the traditional, household preference model can be nested within a family of functional forms. The collective model generates specific restrictions upon the parameters that can the tested. Those restrictions turn out not to be rejected by the data.

The Distribution of Income by Factor Components

This paper furthers the discussion of income inequality decomposition by focusing attention on the problems which arise in this context when available data are restricted to the distribution of factor incomes between groups of families defined by their total income level. First, it sets out the Rao (1969) decomposition of the Gini coefficient for total income in terms of factor shares and factor concentration ratios. Further decomposition of concentration ratios into rank correlation ratios and factor Ginis is recommended when individual data are available. Second, interpretation of concentration ratios as Gini coefficients is shown to be misleading. An analogue in economic theory is required. The results obtained required exploration of the alternative concepts and measurements which are possible when individual family data are available. In turn, these had to be related to the more limited set of concepts which can be calibrated when available data are taken from a secondary source. Caution is advised in interpreting results based on secondary sources of income inequality by factor components.

Satellite-Derived Cumulus Cloud Statistics for Western Kansas

Abstract Increasing world population, decreasing grain reserves and current farm total income levels have aroused interest in new methods that may lead to increased crop production across the Great Plains. Precipitation modification schemes are one such method. Success depends on many factors, especially knowledge of cumulus cloud characteristics during the growing season. We present some cumulus cloud statistics for the months May–September based on analysis of once-per-day satellite products for a limited region (western Kansas) and show that frequency, size and distance between cumulus elements vary substantially on a monthly and yearly basis across the study area. More clouds were recorded in the northwest and southeast portions of the study region. Areas of highest cloud numbers migrated from southeast to northwest from May to September for any given year and for the four-year sample. Eightysix percent of all observed clouds had radii less than 4 km with clouds more closely spaced across the central ...

A Modified Compensatory Price Program for Agriculture

FARM prices affect producers' incomes and influence production and consumption. Farm price policy has been in large measure a tug of war between the desire to use prices to improve farmers' incomes and the necessity of recognizing the allocative powers of price. This necessity is argued formally by numerous economists and, perhaps more effectively, by the realities of the market. The conflict between income objectives and resource allocation objectives has been so clear that it is common among economists to say that price may be used for either but not for both. Despite this, we as a nation continue to try to devise a price program that supports farm income and handles production and consumption problems well enough to be administratively feasible and politically acceptable. The emphasis on the incompatibility of income support and resource allocation as objectives of price policy may have diverted economists' attention from possibilities of achieving the compromise that is so widely sought. This paper investigates one such possibility. A basic assumption of the paper, believed to be generally supported by theory and research on the behavior of supply in agriculture, is that the importance of prices in allocating resources depends mainly upon their significance for marginal revenue rather than upon their relation to the absolute level of total income. That is, the inducement for a farmer to cut down on one enterprise and to substitute or expand another, or to increase or decrease total output, depends on the changes in income expected to result much more than on the level of income. This is hardly a startling conclusion, but it has been given very little recognition in actual or proposed price programs. Uusually it is assumed that if price is to be used to support farm income, the farmer must be paid a price that overvalues his marginal production. Or, the other way round, it has been assumed that if price is to guide farmers in making adjustments along the margin, then the whole of their income must be determined by the value of the marginal product. The result has been farm programs that call for support of prices at above equilibrium levels, that overvalue farmers' marginal production, and that necessitate controls on production, diversion to storage, and subsidies for expansion of markets to make them work. Moreover, it is not clear that they do work except in times of persistent inflation. An alternative program would have to be cumbersome indeed to cause more direct and indirect complications than are now before us.