Wednesday, August 08, 2007

Inequality: some trivia

All of these questions are a matter of personal taste, so no obvious answer for each question.

Question 1:

Do you prefer to be a rich person in a poor country, or a poor person in a rich country? (Note: this question is courtesy of Dani Rodrik. To compare your answer, see the facts here).

Question 2:
Do you prefer to live in a relatively equal country (in terms of personal income or expenditure), or in a relatively unequal one?

Question 3:
Which country do you prefer: Country A where the income growth of the richest 20% is twice as high as that of the poorest 20%, or Country B where the income growth of the poorest 20% is slightly higher than that of the richest 20%?

Question 4:
Which country do you prefer: Country X where the poorest 20% have the ability to experience income growth of 3.4% over a period, or Country Y where the income of the poorest 20% only grows at 2.09% over the same period?

Question 5:
What if Country A = Country X (let's name it 'China'), and Country B = Country Y (let's call it 'Indonesia'). Which one do you think is better for the poor? To visualize it, see the graph at the bottom of this post.


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3 comments:

  1. it's a matter of dumb gummints who don't know how to solve the problem.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Full of economics' assumptions. :-)
    The quality of living & security factor (in general & wider term) will be important reasons when people make a choice.

    Many low-income singaporeans I've met were grumbling on their country, because of pretty high cost of living. But they much prefer to stay in their country due to above conditions.

    visit http://forum-batam.blogspot.com (Potret & Opini) It's just started.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Ah, wan kombat..
    I'm sure your answer is correct. How come it is not correct? Surely when we relax all assumptions, we'll be closer to reality, right?

    But I wonder how will your answer be useful?

    ReplyDelete