part of the developing world - the economies that opened - has begun to grow faster than the rich countries, creating an important trend toward growing equality among open countries.'° What about the concern that openness is leading to growing inequality within countries and that hence the poor are benefiting less or even not at all from these developments? To address this important question we use a large data-set on income distribution compiled from various sources, which we will describe in more detail in Section 4. Most developing countries do not have good household surveys conducted each year, so we have to work with the limited data that are available. Table 4 reports the Gini coefficient closest to 1980 plus the most recent estimate for those countries appearing in Tables 1 and 2 for which we have nationally representative household surveys. Of the 39 countries covered in our three possible definitions of globalizers, only 23 have income distribution data which allows us to make comparisons of the 1990s relative to the 1980s. In almost exactly half of these countries (1 1 out of 12), income inequality has fallen. So, there are liberalizing economies that have had increases in household income inequality over the past 20 years, most notably China. But it is not true in general that the liberalizing economies have had increases in inequality. Costa Rica's and Ecuador's income distributions have been quite stable, and inequality has declined in countries such as India, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Thailand. Table 5 also shows the average per capita GDP growth rate over the whole period from the earliest Gini to the latest, and the growth rate of income of the bottom 20% of the income distribution.

We want to make three points from this table. First, because changes in inequality mostly have been small, growth rates of income of the poor are simnilar to growth rates of per capita GDP. Income of the poor has been rising at more than 3% per year in China, India, Malaysia, and Thailand - all countries m which the growth rate of per capita GDP over the whole period has been strong. Income of the poor has declined in Brazil, Mexico, and the Ivory Coast, countries in which the growth rate of per capita GDP averaged less than 1% over the whole period. Now, we emphasized above that growth rates for almost all of the globalizers accelerated between the 1980s and 1990s. So, if we divide this period by decade we would find in countries such as Mexico that income of the poor declined sharply in the recession years of the 1980s and then increased in the good-growth years of the 1990s. The income of the poor tends to be pretty closely tied to the overall state of the economy.

But a second interesting fact in the table is that there are a couple of globalizers that have had large declines in inequality, with the result that income of the poor rose quite a bit more rapidly than mean income. Malaysia and Thailand are the best examples. (Note, ironically, that despite the financial crisis that started in 1997, Thailand had one of the fastest growth rates of income of the poor: 4.7% per year from 1980 to 1998.) Obviously, the combination of rapid growth and higher income share for the poor is

> **10** This observation is consistent with the more systematic evidence in Ades and Glaeser (1999) who find that poor initially open economies tend to grow faster than poor initially closed economies.

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