SERIES sono pubblicati a cura del Dipartimento di Economia e Finanza dell'Università degli Studi di Bari "Aldo Moro". I lavori riflettono esclusivamente le opinioni degli autori e non impegnano la responsabilità del Dipartimento. SERIES vogliono promuovere la circolazione di studi ancora preliminari e incompleti, per suscitare commenti critici e suggerimenti. Si richiede di tener conto della natura provvisoria dei lavori per eventuali citazioni o per ogni altro uso. SERIES are published under the auspices of the Department of Economics and Finance of the University of Bari. Any opinions expressed here are those of the authors and not those of the Department. Often SERIES divulge preliminary or incomplete work, circulated to favor discussion and comment. Citation and use of these paper should consider their provisional character. Ranking income distributions: a rank-dependent and needs-based approach *

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This paper provides a normative model for distributional comparisons that can be easily adapted for the evaluation of public policies. This model considers individuals whose well-being is characterized by a monetary and a nonmonetary dimension. It also accounts for inequality at the top and bottom of the distribution of both dimensions. It derives third-order inverse stochastic dominance conditions for classes of social welfare functions satisfying: (i) threshold dependent positional transfer (TDPT) sensitivity with respect to the monetary dimension; (ii) TDPT combined with downside inequality aversion with respect to the nonmonetary dimension; (iii) TDPT combined with upside inequality aversion with respect to the nonmonetary dimension. This paper's results emerge along with the existing one supporting downside inequality aversion both with respect to the monetary and nonmonetary dimension, and upside inequality aversion with respect to the monetary dimension. | INTRODUCTIONFor many decades, economists and policymakers made a dogmatic use of the gross domestic product (GDP) for ascertaining the health status of societies. However, especially after the pillar contribution of Sen (1980), an increasing discontent has been expressed worldwide for the use