Inequality Measures, Equivalence Scales and Adjustment for Household Size and Composition

Total household income inequality can be very different from inequality measured at the income per-capita level but only in recent years has the pattern of this divergence been investigated. In this paper, results from Coulter et al. (1992) using a one-parameter equivalence scale are updated using data for Ireland, Italy, the UK and the US. A class of two-parameter equivalence scales, representing relative weights for adults and children, is then analysed. Results are shown to depend on the distribution of household size and composition among deciles of the population. Inequality generally increases with children's weight and decreases with adults' weight. OECD and other two-parameter equivalence scales empirically used show similar results to the one-parameter equivalence scale with elasticity around 0.5.

Multinational Companies and Wage Inequality in the Host Country: The Case of Ireland

In this paper, we analyse the effects of multinational companies on wage inequality in the host country, studying the case of the Irish economy. Based on a model developed by Aghion and Howitt (1998), in which the introduction of new technologies leads to increasing demand for skilled labour and, therefore, to rising inequality, we conduct an econometric study using data for the Irish manufacturing sector between 1979 and 1995. We examine inequality between wages for skilled and unskilled labour within the same manufacturing sector. Our results indicate that there is an inverted-U relationship between wage inequality and the presence of multinationals, i.e., with increasing presence of multinationals, wage inequality first increases, reaches a maximum and decreases eventually, ceteris paribus.

Off-Season Tourists and the Cultural Offer of a Mass-Tourism Destination: The Case of Rimini

This paper assesses the potential implications on off-season tourism of enhancing the cultural offer of Rimini, a popular Italian seaside holiday destination. Rimini, a city of about 130,000 people hosts a total of around 12 million overnight stays, 10 million of which are concentrated in the summer months. In the last twenty years or so, Rimini has been undergoing a policy of deseasoning, which mainly pivots around business tourism (a new fair quarter and important conference venues have been built) and cultural tourism (the city has been investing on both its cultural heritage and art exhibitions). This assessment is carried out through discrete choice experiments submitted to a sample of about 800 off-season tourists, that is, tourists who visited Rimini outside the summer months. Since tourism can be viewed as a composite good, which overall utility depends on the arrangement of the component characteristics, the choice experiments allow to disentangle the importance and the willingness to pay of tourists for different levels of the holiday's characteristics. The choice model incorporates as attributes a number of possible changes to actual tourism features (which are also the subject of public debate), including them in hypothetical alternative "holiday packages". The conditional logit analysis of the choice experiments can highlight the potential synergies and trade-offs between cultural and business tourism. Moreover, the methodology and the structure of the questionnaire allow a partial comparison of our findings with results stemming from two previous studies carried out in Rimini, respectively on summer tourists and on residents. Such comparison highlights synergies and trade-offs between off-season tourists, summer tourists, and residents.tourism demand; cultural tourism; business tourism, conditional logit; urban planning; choice experiments