Sources of Income, Income Inequality and Social Welfare-An Alternative Decomposition

Chakrabarty (1983b) has, in a recent issue of this journal, decomposed Sen's (1974) welfare measure into additive components corresponding to various sources of income. The procedure was illustrated by using data collected by the National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER) for the agricultural year July 1975 to June 1976 and published as Household Income and Its Dispositon. This particular paper was a natural sequel to Chakrabarty (1982, 1983a), in which the theoretical framework for decomposing Sen's welfare measure into additive components was worked out and various welfare measures were computed for Indian income distributions.