In 1973 the Government of Canada and the ten provinces agreed to undertake jointly a complete review of Canada's social security system. The review and development of policy options was scheduled to be completed by 1975 with the implementation of chosen options to take a further two or three years. A prominent and much debated policy option with respect to income security was a guaranteed annual income. In 1974 the Government of Canada and the Province of Manitoba agreed jointly to undertake a guaranteed annual income experiment called the Manitoba Basic Annual Income Experiment. The primary research purpose of the experiment was to provide information respecting the labour supply response of the recipients of a system of guaranteed annual income payments. The experiment officially ended in March, 1979, but did not report on the labour supply response. This study examines the history and fate of the Manitoba Basic Annual Income Experiment. Two major conclusions are drawn. The first conclusion is that the Government of Canada had decided shortly after the experiment had begun that it would not support a one-tiered guaranteed annual income program such as was being tested by the experiment. The second conclusion is that social policy research that requires the use of rigorous and complex social science methodology should be considered an important part of the normal policy-making process, but should be conducted by a research body that is independent of the initiating government(s).

The first part of the thesis describes the construction of Australia's first dynamic cohort microsimulation model. The model consists of a pseudo-cohort of 4000 males and females, who are aged from birth to death, with the processes of mortality, education, marriage, divorce, fertility, labour force participation, the receipt of earnings and other income, the receipt of social security and education transfers and the payment of income tax being simulated for every individual in the model for every year of life. The second part of the thesis describes some of the results which can be derived from the model. These include the differences in lifetime income by lifetime education and family status, the distribution of lifetime income, the difference between the lifetime and annual distributions of income, the lifetime and annual incidence of taxes and transfers, and the direction and extent of intra and interpersonal redistribution of income over the lifecycle due to government transfers and income taxes.

In this thesis, we propose an econometric estimator for a repeat-spell duration model involving fixed effects. Using data on nationally negotiated pay settlements in Britain between 1950 to 73, this estimator is applied to a model that simultaneously determines the timing as well as the magnitude of wage changes in a continuously varying economic environment. Our model is very robust in terms of the distributional assumptions and is particularly useful in analysing the effect on the exit rate of events occurring after the commencement of a spell, such as incomes policies. Consequently, this approach makes it possible to distinguish between two separate effects of such policies on the wage changes: delay and moderation. We further analyse the impact of these policies by introducing a self contained policy sub-model in the system of renegotiation probability and realized wage change nexus, in order to find out the existence of consistent effect exerted by different degrees of allowance and enforcement. We find a significant impact of incomes policy, enforced and non-enforced, on the size as well as the timing of negotiations, which is also confirmed by the results of dynamic simulation.

The thesis examines and accounts for patterns of income maintenance among elderly shanty town residents in Greater Buenos Aires (GBA), Argentina. It uses a framework which includes both macro-level institutional responses to ageing (such as national pension and assistance programmes) and responses at the micro-level (individual and household strategies). First, the thesis accounts for the high proportion of elderly in Argentina and explains the origin of shanty towns in GBA. This is followed by an analysis of the evolution of official social security programmes at the national and local levels and the extent to which gaps in them have been filled by non-state institutions. Particular attention is paid to the up-grading of limited, pluralistic initiatives in the early twentieth century, the imposition of a public sector welfare monopoly in the 1940s and the gradual reintroduction of the voluntary and private sectors since the 1970s. Despite the development of a complex bureaucratic apparatus, the mismanagement of insurance funds and an inconsistent commitment to assistance financing prevented universal state protection for the elderly. Case studies of three shanty towns draw attention to the significance of community initiatives for elderly welfare. Whilst these perform a number of functions, they serve primarily as conduits for resources from supra-local state and non-state agencies. A questionnaire survey and semi-structured interviews demonstrate the economic dynamics of individual households containing elderly members. It is shown that most elderly combine income from a number of sources, including pensions, continued employment and family support and that the relative importance of these different sources is strongly influenced by their gender and labour histories. The significance of bureaucratic obstacles and disinformation in preventing access to support from state programmes is also highlighted.

China is a typical dual economy. Thus, the author employs Lewis' dual-sector model as the theoretical framework to study Chinese income distribution. This thesis aims to investigate: (l) whether the dual-sector model can explain Chinese income inequality; (2) the trend of rural/urban income inequality in a dual economy; (3) the influence of migration on income distribution; (4) official rural poverty line setting, poverty county selection and the urban minimum living standard scheme (MLSS). Based on the systematic analysis of Chinese income inequality from 1978 to 2004, the influence of the intra-rural Gini ratio on the national Gini ratio is shown to have decreased, while the influence of the intra-urban Gini ratio on the national Gini ratio has increased. Compared with regional income disparity, the dominant issue in Chinese income inequality is the income gap between rural and urban areas. Chinese income disparity has worsened since economic transition, which to some extent follows Lewis' dual-sector model. However, the internal reasons for forming a dual economy in China are different from Lewis' hypothesis; the Chinese rural and urban income gap is much larger than under Lewis' assumption. If more attention is paid to agriculture, it is possible to avoid income disparity worsening in a dual economy. Due to the huge surplus of labour in rural areas, Chinese economic development is still in the first stage of Lewis' dual-sector model. According to the newly developed model, rural and urban income inequality in a dual economy will first rise then fall as the urban population increases. The income disparity between rural and urban areas will decline before Lewis' turning point. Owing to the dominant role of the rural and urban income gap in Chinese income disparity, Chinese income inequality will decline before fully absorbing surplus rural labour. In line with quantitative analysis, rural-to-urban migrants played a key role in intensifying Chinese rural and urban income inequality from 1978 to 2001. However, further rural-to-urban migration has had a positive influence on narrowing rural/urban income inequality. On the basis of statistical data, the government is found to have underestimated the rural poverty line; the real poverty ratio is much higher than official estimates indicate. The selection of poverty counties is not a precise way to target the rural poor. In the light of the case study and newly released data from MaCA, it is argued that the approach to setting the urban MLSS is questionable; the MLSS is highly constrained by local government budgets. Current MLSS excludes some real urban poor and rural migrants. Based on the above analysis, some suggestions are provided for policymakers ..

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The crisis that broke out in August 2007 was caused by the fact that the market for collateralised debt obligations (CDOs) had grown to a size sufficient to wreak general havoc when it suddenly collapsed. One of the unresolved questions arising out of the subprime crisis concerns the precise role played by economic inequality. Several authors have argued that income inequality was a root cause of the crisis, but this has remained to date a minority view. This dissertation attempts to show that not only income inequality but also wealth concentration needs to be taken into account to make economic inequality truly prominent in the subprime crisis debate. To fulfil this task, income inequality and wealth concentration trends are shown, and existing Marxian, post-Keynesian, and mainstream crisis theories are discussed. The major contributions of this dissertation are however (i) to provide empirical evidence about the negative impact of investor demand on US long-term bond yields in the pre-crisis period, which gives support to the hypothesis that the increasing global demand for safe assets led to a 'search for yield' by investors; (ii) to present estimates about the specific contribution of high net worth individuals to this negative impact; and (iii) to show that after having helped to cause a yield problem in the major US debt markets, high net worth individuals (via hedge funds) continued to be a major source of the pressure on US banks to resolve this yield problem through the mass production of CDOs.

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This thesis provides an empirical analysis of the following three economic issues: (i) the relationship between financial markets deepening and income inequality; (ii) the . association of consumption insurance with the distribution of income and consumption; and (iii) the effects of women's education on husbands' income and labour market participation. The first issue is addressed in chapter two, where I employ a cross-sectional empirical analysis of a number of countries. The peculiarity here is the use of "new" financial market variables that proxy for access to financial services and for credit constraints. Estimation results show negative and significant regression coefficients for both variables. If this outcome is expected for the indicator of access, it is not for th~ other one. I speculate this is due the fact that the underlying indicator affects only the richer. The second issue is analysed in chapter three. Here a mixture of normal distributions to is used to model UK's household income data in a semi-parametric way; the model's fitting looks reasonably good. This approach is also used to simulate the distribution of consumption under the extreme hypotheses of full smoothing and no smoothing, which are, in turn, compared with actual consumption. Results show a sizable degree of smoothing across household.