Regina Caveny

Relative welfare improvements of low income versus high income countries

Abstract The paper develops a composite measure of welfare attributes for international comparisons based on the concept of Euclidean distance. The attributes are life expectancy, infant mortality, and literacy. The measures were calculated for 1960 and 1980 to allow for relative comparisons among and between countries classified into six economies. It was found that between the two periods, although low income economies have advanced absolutely, the graps in welfare as measured by the three attributes have widened relative to the more advanced developing nations.

Relative Concentration of Sales and Assets in American Business

Hexter and Snow [3] examined the trend of concentration of assets among the largest industrial firms over the period 1955-66. Their investigation covered the top 500 firms as reported annually by Fortune and used the entropy measure of concentration as suggested by Theil [6]. Nissan and Caveny [5] extended the work of Hexter and Snow to cover the years 1967-82 using identical theoretical procedures and data sources. In a recent article, Hexter [4] has pointed out that the use of assets as a basis of measurement of concentration may be flawed. He proposed the use of sales and accordingly calculated entropy values using sales as the base variable for two specific years, 1969 and 1979. These computations led to the conclusion that the concern over using assets rather than sales is not warranted. The purpose of this paper is to provide (1) an extension of the work by Nissan and Caveny [5] to cover the years 1983-86, (2) the computation of entropy based on sales for the entire period 1967-86, and (3) a comparison between the two methods of measurements. The paper is divided into five parts. In section II, a brief description of the model is presented; section III contains the results. In section IV a statistical evaluation is given, and section V presents the summary and conclusions.

Concentration of sales and assets of the top 25 Fortune 500 firms: 1967–90

The present paper, using various indexes of concentration in business, assesses the level of concentration of the top 25 United States industrial firms reported annually by Fortune. An overall conclusion is reached that concentration increased between 1967 and 1990, most noticeably during the 1980s.