School of Economics, Henan University, Kaifeng, Henan, China.
Department of Economics, Hamburg University, Hamburg, Germany.
PLoS One. 2020 Dec 16;15(12):e0242803. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0242803. eCollection 2020.
Not everybody is benefiting equally from rising mean incomes. We discuss the mean-income population share (MPS), the population percentage of earners below mean income, whose evolution can capture how representative rising mean values are for middle income households. Tracking MPS and its associated income share MIS over time indicates to what extent economic growth is inclusive of both the middle and the bottom of the income distribution. We characterize MPS and MIS analytically under different growth scenarios and compare their parametric estimation using micro-level and grouped income data. Our empirical application with panel data of 16 high- and middle-income countries shows that in the last decades rising mean incomes have mostly not favored middle income households in relative perspective, while the overall welfare effects of the changes in MPS and the correlation structure with the Gini coefficient are mixed.
并非每个人都能从平均收入的增长中平等受益。我们讨论平均收入人群份额（MPS），即低于平均收入的收入者的人口百分比，其演变可以捕捉到上升的平均水平对中等收入家庭的代表性。随着时间的推移，跟踪 MPS 及其相关的收入份额 MIS，可以说明经济增长在多大程度上包括了收入分配的中间部分和底部。我们在不同的增长情景下对 MPS 和 MIS 进行了分析，并使用微观层面和分组收入数据对其参数估计进行了比较。我们使用 16 个高收入和中等收入国家的面板数据进行的实证应用表明，在过去几十年中，从相对角度来看，上升的平均收入并没有使中等收入家庭受益，而 MPS 的变化及其与基尼系数的相关结构的整体福利效应则是复杂的。
