Add to ORKGTaking advantage of some of the lessons learned from income inequality comparisons over time and/or across space, we provide a complete framework of analysis to compare the social or aggregate welfare of independent cross-sections of household income and non-income household characteristics. This framework serves to clarify a number of traditional issues on I) the proper domain of the social evaluation problem; II) the need to consider alternative mean invariant inequality notions; III) the decomposition of changes in real welfare into changes of the mean at constant prices and changes in real inequality; IV) the nature of the inter-household welfare comparability assumptions implicit in all empirical work, and V) the strong implications of...