a decomposition analysis of the trend in uk income inequality post war britain has experienced a number of dramatic demographic and social changes that have undoubtedly influenced the distribution of income there has been a rise in the number of pensioners whose incomes are relatively low a considerable increase in the number of young and old households living on their own and a remarkable expansion in the proportion of working wives the potential importance of these structural changes suggests that their impact on the income distribution needs to be examined systematically before any attempt can be made to interpret the observed trend in overall income inequality adequately the method usually adopted for this purpose attempts to create a comparable time series of distributions based on the structural characteristics pertaining in one particular year for example if we wished to investigate the effect of shifts in the age structure of the population this approach would disaggregate the distribution in one year tl and estimate what the distribution would have been like if the age structure had been the same as that observed in some other year to on the assumption that other distributional characteristics such as ageincome differentials and inequality within age groups remain invariant to this demographic change the comparison between the actual distribution at t1 and the constructed distribution at t1 with to s age structure is taken to indicate the impact of changes in the age structure over the period concerned this comparison can be presented in terms of quantile shares summary measures of inequality or the entire lorenz curves this approach known as shift share analysis or standardising the inequality series see semple i975 love and wolfson i976 dinwiddy and reed i977 royal commission i977 rowley and henderson i978 macleod and horner i980 is perfectly adequate for simple and straightforward structural changes when several changes are occurring simultaneously however it becomes difficult to identify the contribution of the individual factors and to assess their relative importance to the overall trend in inequality furthermore the combined impact of several structural influences will not in general sum up to the inequality change requiring explanation the purpose of this paper is to propose an alternative method of analysing

the computation of world income distribution there is a growing perception of the international economy as an interdependent system the un general assembly s 1974 75 declaration on principles and programs for a change in the international economic order assumes that the welfare of peasants workers businessmen civil servants and political elites in less developed countries ldcs are linked to decisions made by economic policymakers in the industrialized nations many people in ldcs especially elites compare their material levels of living with those of rich countries accordingly there is merit to examining global income distribution because scholars do not have a good technique for aggregating country income distributions into a world income distribution they rarely analyze this distribution this article presents a method of calculating global distribution given a set of national distributions as a sidelight to their work on purchasing power parity kravis heston and summers calculate world 145 nonsocialist countries income distribution but by nations not by households or individuals they assume that each individual receives his gnp per capita table 1

globalization poverty and inequality what is the relationship what can be done forbes online of 27 february 20031 offers some information about the world s ten richest people much of the information would cause little surprise the list shows that big money comes from software innovation retailing scale economies the business of oil investment luck and inheritance what is however really striking more so as one ponders the matter is just how rich these ten people are 2 together they had in 2002 a net worth of us 217 billion ranging from bill gates in the lead with us 40 7 billion to john walton son of sam walton founder of wal mart at the rear with us 16 5 billion

changes in returns to education in latin america the role of demand and supply of skills using micro data for the urban areas of argentina brazil chile colombia and mexico the authors document trends in men s returns to education during the 1980s and the 1990s and estimate the role of supply and demand factors in explaining the changes in skill premia they propose a model of demand for skills with three production inputs corresponding to workers with primary secondary and university level education further the authors demonstrate that an unprecedented rise in the supply of workers having completed secondary level education depressed their wages relative to workers with primary level education throughout latin america this supply shift was compounded by a generalized shift in the demand for workers with tertiary education

world product and income international comparisons of real gross product the volume reports on the third phase of the united nations international comparison project icp the main results provide comparisons of real gross domestic product gdp per capita for thirty four countries in 1975 quantity and price comparisons are given also for personal consumption capital formation and public consumption and further subdivisions of final expenditures on gdp are estimated

is global social welfare increasing a critical level enquiry abstract we assess whether global social welfare has improved in the last decades despite or because of the substantial increase in global population we use for this purpose a relatively unknown but simple and attractive social evaluation approach called critical level generalized utilitarianism clgu clgu posits that social welfare increases with population size if and only if the new lives come with a level of living standards higher than that of a critical level despite its attractiveness clgu poses a number of practical difficulties that may explain why the literature has left it largely unexplored we address these difficulties by developing new procedures for making partial clgu orderings the headline result is that we can robustly conclude that world welfare has increased between 1990 and 2005 if we judge that lives with per capita yearly consumption of more than 1 248 necessarily increase social welfare the same conclusion applies to sub saharan africa if and only if we are willing to make that same judgment for lives with any level of per capita yearly consumption above 147 otherwise some of the admissible clgu functions will judge the last two decades increase in global population size to have lowered global social welfare

international income inequality measuring ppp bias by estimating engel curves for food there are large differences between rich and poor people in the world this is of major concern to economists as well as to policy makers the magnitude of the dif ferences however depends on the measure used for comparisons to illustrate per capita income in china is more than five times larger if one uses penn world table pwt 1 incomes rather than exchange rate based ex incomes in this paper we study pwt incomes which aim at correcting for price level dif ferences across countries and identify the bias in them by estimating engel curves for food furthermore we study the relationship between the bias and the income of a country the pwt produces purchasing power parity ppp adjusted incomes and thus the associated bias is referred to as the ppp bias having estimated the bias in pwt incomes we provide new estimates of real income and refer to these as the engel curve ec incomes by comparing the estimated ec incomes and the pwt incomes the issue of how the bias influences estimated inequality is discussed finally we discuss whether ex incomes which simply transform each country s nominal income into one common currency provide better estimates of income than do pwt incomes this paper reports three main findings first there is substantial and systematic ppp bias in the pwt incomes the poorer the country the more its income tends to be overestimated 2 second the ppp bias causes a substantial and robust underesti mation of international inequality the gini index increases substantially when one adjusts for the bias third whereas pwt incomes provide better estimates than the ex incomes for the richer countries the ex incomes which implicitly assume that ppp holds provide better estimates for the poorer countries as we know that price levels differ across countries there is consensus that the seminal work on establishing the pwt was a well founded initiative and the data have been extensively used 3 still although many studies rely on pwt data few focus on the ppp bias in this dataset some contributors focus on one component of the bias however the so called substitution bias and use macro data to measure this

on analyzing the world distribution of income consideration of world inequality should cause reexamination of the key concepts underlying the welfare approach to measuring income inequality and its relation to measuring poverty this reexamination leads to exploration of a new measure that allows poverty and inequality to be considered in the same framework incorporates different approaches to measuring inequality and allows varied expressions of the cost of inequality applied to the world distribution of income for 1820 1992 the new measure provides different perspectives on the evolution of global inequality

global inequality of opportunity how much of our income is determined by where we live suppose that all people in the world are allocated only two characteristics over which they have almost no control country of residence and income distribution within that country assume further that there is no migration the authors show that more than one half of variability in income of world population classified according to their household per capita in one percent income groups by country is accounted for by these two characteristics the role of effort or luck cannot play a large role in explaining global distribution of income

changes in the world distribution of income between 1950 and 1977 trends in the world distribution of income are much discussed and philosophised about the issue of increasing economic inequality among nonsocialist countries in the post war period is central to the debate about the international economic order in i969 the pearson commission report was already pointing to the widening gap between the developed and developing countries as a central issue of our time and was proposing the reduction of that gap as the main objective of international co operation according to that report gnp per capita had increased between i960 and i967 at annual rates of 2 5 and 3 6 in developing and developed countries respectively morawetz i978 found that the gap between the two sets of countries rose from i 2 6 fold in i950 to i3 2 fold in i975 other authors see a more complicated picture atkinson i975 for instance has argued that although the share of poor countries in world income probably declined between i950 and i970 that of the countries at the middle of the world distribution probably increased 2 what may be a mere assessment of relative growth performances among nonsocialist countries becomes a basic theoretical element in the radical stream of economic literature for authors like amin i974 emmanuel i972 and frank i978 the capitalist mode of development necessarily leads to the rich countries of the centre becoming richer and poor countries of the periphery becoming poorer in a degree depending on their involvement in international trade for them a widening gap between developed and developing countries is simply the statistical confirmation of an unavoidable consequence of the national and international capitalist system in the latter perspective the issue at stake is of such importance that the contrast between the abundance of theoretical literature and the lack of empirical work is striking the few existing studies of changes in world distribution provide an inadequate picture intra country income distributions are not taken into account observation periods do not exceed i5 years 8 for andic and peacock i96i and for beckerman and bacon i970 i5 for kirman and tomasini i969 socialist as well as some non socialist countries are excluded and national incomes are converted to u s dollars at official exchange rates 3 finally none of these studies covers the i970s although several shocks which might have affected world distribution occurred during that decade for the non socialist countries to which they refer the andic peacock and beckerman bacon studies found the gini coefficient almost constant over

employment effects of minimum and subminimum wages panel data on state minimum wage laws using panel data on state minimum wage laws and economic conditions for the years 1973 89 the authors reevaluate existing evidence on the effects of a minimum wage on employment their estimates indicate that a 10 increase in the minimum wage causes a decline of 1 2 in employment among teenagers and a decline of 1 5 2 in employment for young adults similar to the ranges suggested by earlier time series studies the authors also find evidence that youth subminimum wage provisions enacted by state legislatures moderate the disemployment effects of minimum wages on teenagers

is globalization reducing poverty and inequality abstract over the past 20 years or so india china and the rest of east asia experienced fast economic growth and falls in the poverty rate latin america stagnated the former soviet union central and eastern europe and sub saharan africa regressed but what are the net trends the neoliberal argument says that world poverty and income inequality fell over the past two decades for the first time in more than a century and a half thanks to the rising density of economic integration across national borders the evidence therefore confirms that globalization in the context of the world economic regime in place since the end of bretton woods generates more mutual benefit than conflicting interests this paper questions the empirical basis of the neoliberal argument

would freeing up world trade reduce poverty and inequality the vexed role of agricultural distortions trade policy reforms in recent decades have sharply reduced the distortions that were harming agriculture in developing countries yet global trade in farm products continues to be far more distorted than trade in nonfarm goods those distortions reduce some forms of poverty and inequality but worsen others so the net effects are unclear without empirical modeling this paper summarizes a series of new economy wide global and national empirical studies that focus on the net effects of the remaining distortions to world merchandise trade on poverty and inequality globally and in various developing countries the global linkage model results suggest that removing those remaining distortions would reduce international inequality largely by boosting net farm incomes and raising real wages for unskilled workers in developing countries and would reduce the number of poor people worldwide by 3 percent the analysis based on the global trade analysis project model for a sample of 15 countries and nine stand alone national case studies all point to larger reductions in poverty especially if only the non poor are subjected to increased income taxation to compensate for the loss of trade tax revenue

unequal societies income distribution and the social contract this paper develops a theory of inequality and the social contract aiming to explain how countries with similar economic and political fundamentals can sustain such different systems of social insurance fiscal redistribution and education finance as those of the united states and western europe with imperfect credit and insurance markets some redistributive policies can improve ex ante welfare and this implies that their political support tends to decrease with inequality conversely with credit constraints lower redistribution translates into more persistent inequality hence the potential for multiple steady states with mutually reinforcing high inequality and low redistribution or vice versa

changes versus levels in earnings as explanatory variables for returns some theoretical considerations this paper considers theoretical aspects of the specification of an earnings variable to explain contemporaneous returns the traditional approach in market based accounting research centers on changes in earnings deflated by beginning of period price as the benchmark explanatory variable for returns the reasons for using this variable appear to follow a three step argument first unexpected earnings determine the theoretically correct concept of the earnings variable second the change in earnings approximates unexpected earnings because current earnings approximate expected earnings i e the random walk hypothesis applies 1 third the beginning of period price deflates the earnings change variable to make it dimensionally consistent with returns 2 while this argument seems overly heuristic we are unaware of a generally acceptable analysis that provides a more compelling argument this lack of rigor has recently become an issue because

explaining import quality the role of the income distribution abstract we examine a generalized version of flam and helpman flam h helpman e 1987 vertical product differentiation and north south trade american economic review 77 810 822 in which consumption prices for quality differentiated goods are rising in household income we provide propositions for aggregating this relationship across heterogenous households to map cross country differences in income distributions to cross country differences in import price distributions the theoretical predictions are examined and confirmed using disaggregated data on prices of traded goods and micro data on household income from the luxemburg income study country pairs with more similar income distributions have more similar import price distributions whether similarity is measured by 1st 4th moment statistics population and consumption shares within world income and product price quantiles or income and price dis similarity indices

is the gasoline tax regressive in the twenty first century taking wealth into account abstract poterba 1991a has much influenced the literature on the distributional effects of carbon pricing poterba argues that the incidence of energy environmental taxes across households is better appreciated if the relative tax burdens are measured against total expenditure interpreted as a proxy for lifetime income instead of annual income this way however since the distribution of total expenditure is structurally more uniform the incidence of energy price increases is always less regressive than when annual income is used this outcome is often taken to lessen the relevance of equity concerns regarding carbon pricing almost twenty five years after poterba 1991a piketty 2014 revived the idea that wealth is a dimension of economic welfare constituting an increasingly important source of inequality we show that omitting wealth in measuring ability to pay means underestimating the regressivity of carbon pricing and its inequity towards younger people using household level data and statistical matching we revisit poterba s application and compare the distributional incidence of the us gasoline tax for different measures of ability to pay total expenditure income and wealth adjusted income regressivity is not a reason to forgo carbon pricing as a cost effective approach to climate mitigation but calls for consideration and compensation of the distributional effects

empirics of world income inequality this article employs a common general formula for inequality indexes to answer several basic questions about intercountry income inequality in recent decades has inequality across nations increased or declined and why have earlier studies yielded mixed results have different rates of population growth played a significant role in the trend have large nations dominated the trend are the results robust over different inequality measures and different income series two findings stand out first different rates of population growth in rich and poor nations played the predominant role in determining change in the distribution of per capita income across nations second the centuries old trend of rising inequality leveled off from 1960 to 1989 the dependency theory thesis of a polarizing world system receives no support

hunger inequality ethics and aid abstractthis article considers the inequality in the cross country distribution of hunger using multiple ethical underpinnings under sovereign equality each nation state receives equal weighting leading to the conclusion that hunger should be concentrated in a few large countries under the democratic ethic individuals receive equal weighting and the global distribution of hungry people is irrelevant inequality aversion deliberately prefers equal levels of hunger across countries these ideals are presented in a general social welfare function and compared to the actual changes in hunger during 1991 2001 the distribution of food aid to reduce both hunger and hunger inequality are considered

does education expansion increase intergenerational mobility education expansion may lead to over education where the social connections of parents may exert more significant influence on the return to education of children with the assumption of a positive correlation between return on human capital and parental income in the presence of over education we show that i the expansion of education may cause horizontal inequity in education opportunities and inefficiency in human capital accumulation ii the positive correlation between return on human capital and parental income causes a more persistent intergenerational immobility iii an expansion of education especially higher education leads to more persistent intergenerational immobility

estimation of a censored dynamic panel data model panel data models have a long history in econometrics and have become increasingly popular in empirical economics over the past two decades panel data expand our opportunities to study more complex economic relationships by for example allowing for individual heterogeneity and dynamic feedback these goals are often achieved by including in the model individual specific effects and lagged dependent variables these two features of the dynamic panel data model however often create difficulties in estimation although much progress has been made in the linear panel data model see among others hsiao 1986 baltagi 1995 and arellano and honore 2001 for review our knowledge of general nonlinear dynamic panel data models is very limited in most nonlinear models strict exogeneity of the explanatory variables is still the key assumption the main difficulty is that with nonlinearity it is not obvious how to difference away the individual specific effects and how to use instrumental variable type techniques 2 despite these difficulties some developments have been made on estimating certain nonlinear dynamic models using the fixed effects approach for example the censored regression models honore 1993 honore and hu 2001 the sample selection models kyriazidou 2001 the discrete choice models honor6 and kyriazidou 2000 and the models with multiplicative individual effects chamberlain 1992 wooldridge 1997

ranking income distributions a large variety of policy questions involve choices between social states and a consequent ordering of the feasible alternatives when these social states are related to the levels of welfare experienced by individuals or households two central issues stand out in determining the relative desirability of different social outcomes one of these is the essentially positive exercise of achieving comparability between households with different characteristics such as composition or preferences operating in different environments for example facing different price structures the other concerns the normative judgments implicit in the evaluation of alternative allocations of resourcesthe emphasis placed on inequality between households and the extent to which greater inequality can be compensated by higher average living standards this paper focuses on the second of these issues and in doing so we abstract from the problem of household comparability by considering a population of n households identical in all respects except for their incomes the question of ordering social states then becomes one of ranking income distributions over a group of anonymous households or individuals borrowing the usual assumptions imposed on consumer preferences we may suppose that a social ordering of income distributions can be represented by a welfare function 2

how polarized is the global income distribution abstract the interest in the level of global inequality has surged in recent years this paper complements existing estimates of global inequality by providing the first estimates of the level of bipolarization of the global income distribution during 1975 2010 global bipolarization declined substantially according to relative measures while it increased according to absolute measures the results mirror trends in global inequality over the same period

the heterogeneous effects of the minimum wage on employment across states abstract this paper studies the relationship between the minimum wage and the employment rate in the us using the framework of a panel structure model the approach allows the minimum wage along with some other controls to have heterogeneous effects on employment across states which are classified into a group structure the effects on employment are the same within each group but differ across different groups the number of groups and the group membership of each state are both unknown a priori the approach employs the c lasso technique a recently developed classification method that consistently estimates group structure and leads to oracle efficient estimation of the coefficients empirical application of c lasso to a us restaurant industry panel over the period 1990 2006 leads to the identification of four separate groups at the state level the findings reveal substantial heterogeneity in the impact of the minimum wage on employment across groups with both positive and negative effects and geographical patterns manifesting in the data the results provide some new perspectives on the prolonged debate on the impact of minimum wage on employment

tax competition and the distribution of income in this paper we provide a two country two class model of asymmetric capital tax competition we show formally that poor people living in small countries can benefit from capital tax competition and therefore they are in favor of it in order to benefit from capital inflow from larger countries poor people in smaller countries accept less within country income redistribution as a consequence between country income inequality is increased by tax competition

weighting vectors and international inequality changes in environmental indicators an analysis of co2 per capita emissions and kaya factors abstract analyses of international inequality in environmental factors such as the well known co 2 per capita or the kaya factors that is carbon intensity energy intensity and affluence have overlooked the effect that weighting vectors of distance functions and their time variations can have on the evolution of the inequality observed thus for example increases in the relative weight of countries with low emissions tend ceteris paribus to increase the inequality even when the vector of international per capita emissions remains unchanged this effect strictly associated with share variations is assessed in this paper by means of a simple decomposition methodology this methodology allows us to ascertain what part of the time variation of the inequality is attributable to the variations in the shares and or the variations in the environmental variable analysed and in turn suggests extending the analysis to the group components of inequality shorrocks 1980 this proposition is used empirically to assess international inequalities in co 2 per capita and the kaya factors for a variety of sub periods during the 1971 2007 period and for various satisfactory inequality indices

a new data set measuring income inequality this article presents a new data set on inequality in the distribution of income the authors explain the criteria they applied in selecting data on gini coefficients and on individual quintile groups income shares comparison of the new data set with existing compilations reveals that the data assembled here represent an improvement in quality and a significant expansion in coverage although differences in the definition of the underlying data might still affect inter temporal and international comparability based on this new data set the authors do not find a systematic link between growth and changes in aggregate inequality they do find a strong positive relationship between growth and reduction of poverty

earnings as an explanatory variable for returns in this paper we investigate whether the level of earnings divided by price at the beginning of the stock return period is relevant for evaluating earnings returns associations the primary model motivating this research relies on the idea that book value owners equity and market value are both stock variables indicating the wealth of the firm s equity holders the related flow variables after adjusting for dividends are respectively earnings divided by price at the beginning of the return period a p 1 and market returns it then follows that earnings divided by beginning of period price should be associated with stock returns although models based on a relation between market value and book value are used occasionally in the accounting research literature see for example landsman 1986 harris and ohlson 1987 and barth

the limitations of decentralized world redistribution an optimal taxation approach abstract a centralized scheme of world redistribution that maximizes a border neutral social welfare function subject to the disincentive effects it would create generates a drastic reduction in world consumption inequality dropping the gini coefficient from 0 69 to 0 25 in contrast an optimal decentralized i e with no cross country transfers redistribution has a miniscule effect on world income inequality thus the traditional public finance concern about the excess burden of redistribution cannot explain why there is so little world redistribution actual foreign aid is vastly lower than the transfers under the simulated world income tax suggesting that voluntary world transfers subject to a free rider problem produces an outcome that is consistent with rich countries such as the united states either placing a much lower value on the welfare of foreigners or else expecting that a very significant fraction of cross border transfers is wasted the product of the welfare weight and one minus the share of transfers that are wasted constitutes the implicit weight that the united states assigns to foreigners we calculate that value to be as low as 1 2000 of the value put on the welfare of an american suggesting that u s policy is consistent with social preferences that place essentially no value on the welfare of the citizens of the poorest countries or that implicitly assumes that essentially all transfers are wasted

distributional consequences of globalisation empirical evidence from panel data abstract this paper investigates the impact of globalisation on cross country inequality using a large panel dataset the findings reveal that location and capital are the main determinants of inequality trade intensity and foreign direct investment make only a small contribution approximately 4 the relative contributions of trade and foreign direct investment to inequality have changed little over time and have certainly not increased at the same rate as the rise in global trade and investment activity hence globalisation does not emerge as a significant factor in driving cross country inequality differences emerge when countries are grouped by relative income but the main findings persist

growth inequality and poverty looking beyond averages the evidence is compelling that the poor in developing countries do typically share in the gains from rising aggregate affluence and in the losses from aggregate contraction but how much do poor people share in growth do they gain more in some settings than others do some gain while others lose does pro poor growth mean more or less aggregate growth recent theories and evidence suggest some answers but deeper microeconomic empirical work is needed on growth and distributed change only then will we have a firm basis for identifying the specific policies and programs needed to complement and possibly modify growth oriented policies

international inequalities in human development and real income abstract two well recommended measures are used to compute intercountry inequalities in real gdp per capita ry and the index of human development hdi despite very high positive correlation between ry and hdi the inequality measures reveal dramatically different pictures

true world income distribution 1988 and 1993 first calculation based on household surveys alone the paper derives world income or expenditure distribution of individuals for two years 1988 and 1993 it is the first paper to calculate world distribution for individuals based entirely on household survey data from 91 countries and adjusted for differences in purchasing power parity between the countries measured by the gini index inequality increased from an already very high 63 in 1988 to 66 in 1993 the increase was driven more by rising differences in mean incomes between the countries than by rising inequalities within countries the most important contributors were rising urban rural differences in china and slow growth of rural incomes in south asia compared to several large developed market economies

the world distribution of income falling poverty and convergence period we estimate the world distribution of income by integrating individual income distributions for 138 countries between 1970 and 2000 country distributions are constructed by combining national accounts gdp per capita to anchor the mean with survey data to pin down the dispersion poverty rates and head counts are reported for four specific poverty lines rates in 2000 were between one third and one half of what they were in 1970 for all four lines there were between 250 and 500 million fewer poor in 2000 than in 1970 we estimate eight indexes of income inequality implied by our world distribution of income all of them show reductions in global inequality during the 1980s and 1990s

variance estimators of the gini coefficient probability sampling an estimator of the gini coefficient the well known income inequality measure of a finite population is defined for an arbitrary probability sampling design taking the sampling design into consideration alternative estimators of the variance of the estimated gini coefficient are introduced the sampling performance of the gini coefficient estimator and its variance estimators is studied by means of a monte carlo study using stratified sampling from a miniature population of swedish households with authentic income data

gold exploitation and socioeconomic outcomes the case of burkina faso abstract in the early 2000s burkina faso launched several legal reforms aimed at increasing gold production this resulted in a gold mining boom making gold the main export product and the main source of economic growth of the country we hypothesize that gold extraction improved population living standards this paper investigates how the gold boom in burkina faso which began in 2007 has affected socioeconomic outcomes we use a simple theoretical model to motivate the testing of several hypotheses regarding these impacts employing a difference in differences strategy as well as panel data models we estimate the impacts using data from household surveys undertaken in 2003 and 2009 and administrative data consistent with our model the results suggest that areas hosting gold extraction have better average living standards in terms of headcount ratios poverty gaps and household expenditures than do areas without gold however the gold boom is also shown to have potentially increased local inequality and child labor in areas with these income gains these results demonstrate the importance of proactive government policy in mitigating negative welfare impacts

what do we know about global income inequality in this paper we review the recent literature on global interpersonal income inequality while all estimates agree that the level is very high with a gini of between 0 630 and 0 686 in the 1990s there is no consensus regarding the direction of change we discuss methodological issues including the use of national accounts versus survey based estimates of mean income or consumption and the choice of purchasing power parity exchange rates findings of a rise or fall in global income inequality are not robust across different estimation methods and datasets given the diversity of estimates and various sources of uncertainty including gaps and errors in the underlying data we conclude there is insufficient evidence to determine the direction of change in global interpersonal inequality in recent decades

globalization and global inequality assessing the impact of the rise of china and india 1980 20051 this article uses updated purchasing power parity measurements of countries income and a new strategy for approximating global inequality to examine how global income inequality as a combination of increasing average within country inequality and decreasing between country inequality changed in the period 1980 2005 in view of the overwhelming influence of china and india on trends in global inequality change the authors base their strategy on estimating the change in world average within country inequality from change in within country inequality of these two countries the authors find that global inequality decreased continuously throughout the period they also project that global inequality will likely rise again in the next 25 years unless the stellar economic performance of china and india spreads widely to other developing countries

a comparison of international income inequality an ordered probit model analysis in this study the ordered probit model with marginal effect was applied to examine the key elements that influence changes in the gini levels the empirical results indicated that export incentives and poverty have a positive impact on the gini levels moreover the marginal effect revealed that export incentives increase income inequality for countries with higher inequality and reduce inequality for those countries with a relatively even income distribution likewise the study found that the asian pacific economic cooperation apec and the eu countries move from inequality to equality more efficiently than countries in the latin american integration association laia

global inequality in well being dimensions abstract this paper contributes to the literature on global inequality in multidimensional well being by examining inter country disparities in the longevity knowledge and standard of material living components of the well known and widely used human development index for the years 1992 2004 it differs from previous studies by examining global inequality in each of the components of this index alongside that of the index as a whole thus side stepping ambiguities over weighting that are inherent to multidimensional well being indices the gini coefficient both population and non population weighted is used to measure the extent of inequality results indicate that the different components often provide very different information to the index as a whole especially with respect to changes in global inequality over time most component variables show declines in global inequality whereas the longevity component exhibits increased inequality since 1992

recent trends in income inequality in latin america this paper documents patterns and recent developments on income inequality in latin america la new comparative international evidence confirms that la is a region of high inequality although maybe not the highest in the world income inequality has fallen in the 2000s suggesting a turning point from the substantial increases of the 1980s and 1990s the fall in inequality is significant and widespread but it does not seem to be based on strong fundamentals

examining inequality who really benefits from global growth summary this paper analyzes global consumption distribution from 1993 to 2001 it demonstrates that half of the increase in global consumption in the 1990s benefited the developed world populations the other main beneficiary was china s population the number of chinese in extreme poverty fell and a new global middle class emerged elsewhere the per capita consumption of the poor rose at half the global average rate much less than one to one growth growth did help the poor but it was much better for the rich the analysis suggests that relying on growth to reduce poverty is rather inefficient more direct state interventions seem more effective these insights are poorly illustrated by global indices such as gini coefficients but are strikingly demonstrated by density curves the wider use of which could better inform debate in this area

world inequality and globalization the article assesses recent attempts to measure the level and changes in world inequality it compares results based on country averages population weighted inter country gini coefficients and combinations of inter country and intra country distribution figures most measures agree that inequality grew up to 1980 some suggest that it stabilized or declined slightly after that date but that conclusion is not definitive the article argues against reliance on single indicators to measure world inequality as opposed to looking at various measures including inequality between regions and the ratios of incomes of the poor and the rich according to several of these measures inequality has continued to grow the addition of variables other than income life expectancy and education appear to reduce inequality but this is largely an illusion copyright 2004 oxford university press

world welfare is rising estimation using nonparametric bounds on welfare measures abstract i take a new approach to measuring world inequality and welfare over time by constructing robust bounds for these series instead of imposing parametric assumptions to compute point estimates i derive sharp bounds on the atkinson inequality index that are valid for any underlying distribution of income conditional on given fractile shares and gini coefficients while the bounds are too wide to reject the hypothesis that world inequality may have risen i show that world welfare rose unambiguously between 1970 and 2006 this conclusion is valid for alternative methods of dealing with countries and years with missing surveys alternative survey harmonization procedures alternative gdp series or if the inequality surveys used systematically underreport the income of the very rich or suffer from nonresponse bias

international redistribution of income summary how do international policies on aid trade and factor movements affect the international distribution of income we calculate the impact by world decile of the actual level of aid flows and the effect on income of merchandise trade restrictions by high income countries we find that aid s distributional impact is equality enhancing extremely small in terms of changes in inequality measures but of some importance for the lowest decile of the distribution we also find that some of this impact is counteracted by lost potential income in the lower deciles from merchandise trade barriers imposed by high income countries

what can new survey data tell us about recent changes in distribution and poverty it has been claimed that in recent times the poor have lost ground both relatively and absolutely even when average levels of living have risen this article tests that claim using household surveys for 67 developing and transitional economies over 1981 94 it finds that changes in inequality and polarization were uncorrelated with changes in average living standards distribution improved as often as it worsened in growing economies and negative growth was often more detrimental to distribution than positive growth overall there was a small decrease in absolute poverty although with diverse experiences across regions and countries almost always poverty fell with growth in average living standards and rose with contraction

pitfalls in cross section studies with integrated regressors a survey and new developments in cross section studies if the dependent variable is i 0 but the regressor is i 1 the true slope must be zero in the resulting unbalanced regression a spuriously significant relationship ma

benefit sharing among local resource users the role of property rights skewed distributions of benefits from natural resources can fuel social exclusion and conflict threatening sustainability this paper analyzes how user group property rights to harvest forest products affect the distribution of benefits from those products within user groups we argue that groups with recognized harvesting rights share benefits more equally among group members than groups without such rights we test this argument with data from 350 forest user groups in 14 developing countries our results suggest that securing harvesting rights for local user groups can contribute to more equal benefit sharing especially in ethnically homogenous groups

inequality and institutions abstract this paper presents theory and evidence on the relationship between inequality and institutional quality we exhibit a model in which the two may dynamically reinforce each other and set to test this relationship with a broad array of institutional measures the double causality between institutional strength and a more equal distribution of income is empirically established using dynamic panel and linear feedback analysis

explaining international and intertemporal variations in income inequality this paper explores the propositions that income inequality is relatively stable within countries and that it varies significantly among countries a new and expanded data set provides broad support for both propositions drawing on a political economy and capital market imperfection arguments to explain the intertemporal and international variation in inequality the empirical analysis shows that the predicted variables associated with the first argument a measure of civil liberties and the initial level of secondary schooling and the second argument a measure of financial depth and the initial distribution of land are indeed important determinants of inequality this paper explores two propositions regarding income inequality they are first income inequality is relatively stable within countries and second it varies significantly across countries to illustrate note that the gini coefficient in india remained almost constant for forty years 1951 92 with mean 32 6 and standard deviation 2 0 2 in contrast the variation in gini coefficients across countries is large 61 9 in honduras in 1968 compared with 17 8 in bulgaria in 1976 if substantiated these propositions have potentially significant implications for poverty the significance of the first is obvious barring any fundamental socio political change poverty reduction will depend crucially on the rate of economic growth given this the significance of the second is that in inegalitarian economies the poor will enjoy a smaller share of any national increment in income than in more egalitarian ones drawing on a new and expanded data set on inequality deininger and squire 1996a the first of the paper s three sections conducts standard statistical tests of the two propositions the sample comprises 573 observations on the most common measure of inequality the gini coefficient for 49 developed and developing countries covering the period 1947 94 the results broadly confirm our two propositions specifically analysis of variance anova shows that about 90 of the total variance in the gini coefficients

global earnings inequality 19702015 we estimate trends in global earnings dispersion across occupational groups using a new database covering 66 developed and developing countries between 1970 and 2015 our main finding is that global earnings inequality has declined primarily during the 2000s when the global gini coefficient dropped nearly 10 points and the earnings share of the world s poorest half doubled decomposition analyses emphasize the role of income convergence between poor and rich countries and that earnings have become more similar within occupations in traded industries sensitivity checks show that the results are robust to varying real exchange rates inequality measures and population definitions

inequality among world citizens 1820 1992 this paper investigates the distribution of well being among world citizens during the last two centuries the estimates show that inequality of world distribution of income worsened from the beginning of the 19th century to world war ii and after that seems to have stabilized or to have grown more slowly in the early 19th century most inequality was due to differences within countries later it was due to differences between countries inequality in longevity also increased during the 19th century but then was reversed in the second half of the 20th century perhaps mitigating the failure of income inequality to improve in the last decades jel d31 f0 n0 o0