History-dependent growth incidence: a characterization and an application to the economic crisis in Italy

We propose a characterization of an aggregate measure of growth that takes into account the initial economic conditions of individuals. Our measure is a weighted average of individuals’ income growth with weights that are decreasing with the rank of the individual in the initial income distribution. We apply our theoretical framework to evaluate the growth processes experienced by the Italian population. Even when we correct for the differences in mean income growth, and focus on the distribution of growth only, the 2008-2010 growth process was the worst of the last decade.