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For a Sustainable World, What Should HFE Optimize?
Published in Andrew Thatcher, Klaus J. Zink, Klaus Fischer, Human Factors for Sustainability, 2019
Colin G. Drury, Peter A. Hancock
Perhaps it is well to start with national economics, as this is one driver of most of the QoL and happiness statistics (OECD, 2008; Pinker, 2018). Both income and accumulated wealth start off very unequal in most countries. The Gini coefficient then decreases quite rapidly with economic development, then levels out in the most developed countries, with a tendency in recent years to actually increase. For example, Figure 2.1 plots the Gini coefficient for income over the past 50 years for the United States. The first conclusion from Figure 2.1 is that the Gini coefficient is around 0.3 to 0.5 for income. We shall see later that this is much smaller than for accumulated wealth. The second conclusion is that the Gini coefficient has seen a steady rise over the past half century. Income is quite unequal but much less unequal than accumulated wealth where the equivalent Gini is around 0.8. Figure 2.2 shows a different, and probably more accessible, way to present inequality, using the fraction of accumulated wealth owned by different upper percentiles. The time scale is also longer, showing the decrease in wealth inequality to about 1980, then the steady rise comparable to income inequality. What we learn from these economic data is that over the long term, both income and wealth become more equal, but, at least among developed counties, this trend has recently reversed. The other point of note is that accumulated wealth shows much greater inequality than income.
Human Right to Sanitation and the Inclusive Development Imperative
Published in Pedi Chiemena Obani, Strengthening the Human Right to Sanitation as an Instrument for Inclusive Development, 2018
The indicators for acceptability, accessibility, accountability, affordability, availability, dignity, extra-territorial obligations, safety and sustainability emerge from the literature review and content analysis and inductive analysis of the HRS framework. The remaining indicators are selected from the existing human development monitoring frameworks: (a) Gini coefficient which ordinarily measures the disparity in the distribution of income among individuals or households within a country from a perfectly equal distribution (represented by a value of 0) to absolute inequality (represented by a value of 100), with 40 as the threshold adopted by the United Nations Human Settlements Programme, could serve as a proxy indicator of fair distribution of resources to counter direct economic drivers like household poverty; (b) Human Development Index (HDI), a composite index that measures life expectancy, education and per capita income which are some of the real life issues affected by poor sanitation services (see section 1.2); (c) The Economists Intelligence Unit Democracy Index, a composite index that measures participation in electoral process and pluralism, civil liberties, the functioning of government, political participation and political culture from around 167 countries across the world and thereby serves as a proxy indicator of participation in democratic processes which is important for realizing the HRS; and (d) the World Justice Project Rule of Law Index, which ordinarily scores and ranks the rule of law in different countries based on eight factors, including: constraints on government powers, absence of corruption, open government, fundamental rights, order and security, regulatory enforcement, civil justice, and criminal justice, can serve as a proxy indicator of HRS principles especially the rule of law.
The Advance of Economic Liberalization in India
Published in Manu V. Mathai, Nuclear Power, Economic Development Discourse and the Environment, 2013
Social inequality is an acknowledged and deepening attribute of India’s political economy, more so in the years following economic liberalization. Reviewing India’s economic development experience at the beginning of the twenty-first century, Dreze and Sen (2002: vi) find that “the lives of a majority of its citizens continue to be blighted by endemic poverty, undernutrition, ill health, educational deprivation, environmental degradation and wide-ranging social inequalities.” These stark and appalling disparities in social and economic life render India, even in the measured language of these authors, as a “bastion of disparity.” A grave illustration of this situation is the finding of the National Family Health Survey that 46 percent of 0- to 3-year-olds suffered from malnutrition (Planning Commission, 2008). Between 2005 and 2010 income inequality increased from a Gini coefficient of 0.27 to 0.29 for rural areas, and from 0.35 to 0.37 in urban areas. Reporting on the first decade of economic liberalization in India, Jayadev et al. (2007: 3858) have identified interesting and important trends in the distribution of assets and net worth of individuals. Their conclusion is that despite nearly universal increases in absolute levels of wealth across various axes (e.g., rural, urban, education, caste, religion and employment), there has been an “unambiguous increase in inequality from 1991–2002 according to all standard absolute inequality measures.” The PC recognizes these realities and now employs the vocabulary of “inclusive growth.” But it remains to be seen if growth, conceived in terms of Cornucopianism and materialized through the megamachine organization, can be truly inclusive – a feat that is yet to be pulled off by any country without undermining ecological limits and becoming an ecological debtor.
Assessing the energy efficiency potential of a closed-loop supply chain for household durable metal products in China
Published in International Journal of Production Research, 2023
Furthermore, the cumulative function of the income distribution function constitutes the Lorenz curve, which can generate the Gini coefficient to estimate the inequality of different income residents. NBSC (2022) surveyed approximately 66,000 families from 2004 to 2012. Households were divided into eight groups according to different incomes in this time period and counted the ownership of durable goods, such as private cars and refrigerators, under different groups. However, the sampling survey of different income groups has been cancelled since 2013. The relationship between residents’ income and car ownership is shown in Figure 3. Not surprisingly, car ownership will increase with the increase in residents’ income. However, there are different degrees of vertical displacement in the curve between adjacent years, which is caused by the price index. Referring to the historical data of developed countries, car prices will decline with the development of technologies. In other words, the rise in residents’ income and the decline in car prices have jointly driven the increase in total ownership. Figure 3 shows that the interval of different years is significantly decreased after taking car prices into account. Therefore, we can take per-capita disposal income over the price index (ratio of price in year t compared to the base year) as residents’ purchasing ability for durable products.
Sources of inequality in household electricity consumption: evidence from Taiwan
Published in Energy Sources, Part B: Economics, Planning, and Policy, 2022
where is the disposable income of household i and is the mean of the disposable income. The value of the Gini coefficient ranges between 0 and 1. A higher Gini coefficient indicates higher income inequality. Therefore, the value of K ranges between −2 and 1. When the concentration curve of electricity expenditure lies below the Lorenz curve of income, the value of K is positive. On the other hand, the value of K is negative if the concentration curve of electricity expenditure lies above the Lorenz curve of income. A positive value of K implies that the cumulative share of electricity expenditure is less than the cumulative share of household income, which means that electricity expenditure is progressive. Moreover, a negative value of K indicates that electricity expenditure is regressive.
Creativity-driven urban regeneration in the post-socialist context - The case of Csepel Works, Budapest
Published in Journal of Urban Design, 2022
Judit Taraba, Claudiu Forgaci, Arie Romein
The social consequences of these housing development projects were many: a rapid increase of owner-occupied housing – up to 80% of the total stock (Kovács, Wiessner, and Zischner 2013), and the gentrification-led displacement of existing residents (Keresztély and Scott 2012). Since 2013, Fellner et al. (2019) have observed a general tendency of rising housing costs compared to average income all over the city, which is sharpest in districts of the Inner City and the Hilly Zone. These developments of the housing market can be seen as indicators of increasing socio-economic inequality since the start of regime change when Hungary was a relatively egalitarian society. The value of the country’s Gini coefficient of income (in)equality rapidly increased between 1980 and 2000 but has only slightly fluctuated since then and is now still below the EU average: 28.7 (HU) versus 30.4 (EU) in 2019 (Mavridis and Mosberger 2017; Eurostat 2020). Yet Budapest is exceptional because the loss of industrial employment has taken place simultaneously with the growth of a much larger post-industrial service economy than in the rest of the country. This has triggered the growth of a relatively wealthy middle class of service workers who can afford the private apartments that were renovated or newly built since the end of the 1990s.