Inequality Convergence


Book Description

Is income inequality tending to fall in countries with high inequality and to rise in those where inequality is low? Is there a process of convergence toward medium-level inequality?




America's Inequality Trap


Book Description

The gap between the rich and the poor has grown dramatically in the United States and is now at its widest since at least the early 1900s. While by most measures the economy has been improving, soaring cost of living and stagnant wages have done little to assuage economic anxieties. Conditions like these seem designed to produce a generation-defining intervention to balance the economic scales and enhance opportunities for those at the middle and bottom of the country’s economic ladder—but we have seen nothing of the sort. Nathan J. Kelly argues that a key reason for this is that rising concentrations of wealth create a politics that makes reducing economic inequality more difficult. Kelly convincingly shows that, when a small fraction of the people control most of the economic resources, they also hold a disproportionate amount of political power, hurtling us toward a self-perpetuating plutocracy, or an “inequality trap.” Among other things, the rich support a broad political campaign that convinces voters that policies to reduce inequality are unwise and not in the average voter’s interest, regardless of the real economic impact. They also take advantage of interest groups they generously support to influence Congress and the president, as well as state governments, in ways that stop or slow down reform. One of the key implications of this book is that social policies designed to combat inequality should work hand-in-hand with political reforms that enhance democratic governance and efforts to fight racism, and a coordinated effort on all of these fronts will be needed to reverse the decades-long trend.




Inequality and Growth


Book Description

The combination of stagnant growth and high levels of income inequality renewed the debate about whether a more even distribution of income can spur economic activity. This paper tests for cross-country convergence in income inequality and estimates its impact on economic growth with a heterogeneous panel structural vector autoregression model, which addresses some empirical challenges plaguing the literature. We find that income inequality is converging across countries, and that its impact on economic growth is heterogeneous. In particular, while the median response of real per capita GDP growth to shocks in income inequality is negative and significant, the dispersion around the estimates is large, with at least one fourth of the countries in the sample presenting a positive effect. The results suggest that the negative effect is mainly driven by the Middle East and Central Asia and the Western Hemisphere across regions, and emerging markets across income levels. Finally, we find evidence that improved institutional frameworks can reduce the negative effect of income inequality on growth.




Social Institutions, Gender Inequality, and Regional Convergence in Developing Countries


Book Description

I. Social institutions and gender inequality -- 1. The Social Institutions and Gender Index (SIGI) -- 1.1. Introduction -- 1.2. The Database -- 1.3. Construction of the Subindices -- 1.3.1. Measuring the Association between Categorical Variables -- 1.3.2. Aggregating Variables to Build a Subindex -- 1.4. The Social Institutions and Gender Index (SIGI) -- 1.5. Results -- 1.5.1. Country Rankings and Regional Patterns -- 1.5.2. Simple Correlation with other Gender-related Indices -- 1.5.3. Regression Analysis -- 1.6. Conclusion -- 1.7. Tables -- 1.8. Figures -- 2. Why care about social inst. related to gender ineq. -- 2.1. Introduction -- 2.2. Social Institutions and Household Decisions -- 2.2.1. Social Institutions and Female Education -- 2.2.2. Social Institutions and Fertility and Child Mortality Rates -- 2.3. Social Institutions and the Society: Governance -- 2.4. Data -- 2.5. Empirical estimation and Results -- 2.5.1. Empirical estimation -- 2.5.2. Results -- 2.6. Conclusion -- 2.7. Tables -- 3. Reexamining the link between gender and corruption -- 3.1. Introduction -- 3.2. Empirical Estimation and Results -- 3.2.1. Data -- 3.2.2. Empirical Estimation -- 3.2.3. Results -- 3.3. Conclusion -- 3.4. Tables -- 3.5. Figures -- II. Regional growth convergence in Colombia -- 4. Regional convergence in Colombia: Income indicators -- 4.1. Introduction -- 4.2. Motivation and Background -- 4.2.1. Economic Background -- 4.2.2. Data Issues Affecting Convergence Results in Colombia -- 4.3. The Solow Model and Its Estimation -- 4.3.1. The Solow Model -- 4.3.2. Absolute Beta-Convergence -- 4.3.3. Conditional Convergence -- 4.3.4. Parameter Heterogeneity: Are There Different Steady States? -- 4.3.5. Sigma-Convergence -- 4.4. Distributional Approach: Quah's Critique -- 4.5. Empirical Estimation and Results -- 4.5.1. Sigma-Convergence -- 4.5.2. Absolute Beta-Convergence -- 4.5.3. Conditional Beta-Convergence Using Control Variables -- 4.5.4. Beta-Convergence Using Time-Series Cross-Sectional Data -- 4.5.5. Kernel Density Estimators -- 4.6. Conclusions -- 4.7. Tables -- 4.8. Figures -- 5. Regional convergence in Colombia: Social indicators -- 5.1. Introduction -- 5.2. Motivation -- 5.3. Methods for Measuring Convergence -- 5.4. Data and Empirical Estimation -- 5.4.1. Data -- 5.4.2. Empirical estimation -- 5.5. Results -- 5.5.1. Literacy Rate -- 5.5.2. Infant Survival Rate -- 5.5.3. Life Expectancy at Birth -- 5.5.4. Nourishment -- 5.6. Conclusions -- 5.7. Tables -- 5.8. Figures -- Appendices -- Appendix to Essay 1.




Varieties of Economic Inequality


Book Description

Recently, the issue of inequality has regained attention in economic and political debates. Although this interest is welcome, the debate is still mostly focused on income or wealth distribution, which is an important aspect but does not present a complete view of inequality. Most of the theoretical and empirical studies produced by economists concern personal income distribution or factor income distribution. This is more evident in the studies of the evolution and characteristics of contemporary capitalism and globalization. Varieties of Economic Inequality considers both theoretical perspectives and empirical evidence of aspects such as income, gender, race, technology, power, region, education and class. Ultimately, this text rejects the idea of supposed long run constant factor shares, the positive effects of inequality and the greater importance of absolute level of income compared to its unequal distribution, and instead reveals the structural inequalities that exist within societies. This book advocates a move away from the focusing on inequality at the level of the individual and suggests policy for eradicating these various forms of inequality. It is suitable for those who study political economy, social inequality as well as economic theory and philosophy.




Economic Well-Being and Inequality


Book Description

Research on Economic Inequality, Volume 22 collects papers from the Fifth ECINEQ Meeting, bringing together research from both senior and emerging scholars in the field of income distribution and poverty studies. The Volume is rounded out with investigations into the inequality of leisure time, regional convergence, and specific country studies.




Global poverty and Inequality: A Review of the Evidence


Book Description

Abstract: Drawing on a compilation of data from household surveys representing 130 countries, many over a period of 25 years, this paper reviews the evidence on levels and recent trends in global poverty and income inequality. It documents the negative correlations between both poverty and inequality indices, on the one hand, and mean income per capita on the other. It points to the dominant role of Asia in accounting for the bulk of the world's poverty reduction since 1981. The evolution of global inequality in the last decades is also described, with special emphasis on the different trends of inequality within and between countries. The statistical relationships between growth, inequality and poverty are discussed, as is the correlation between inequality and the growth elasticity of poverty reduction. Some of the recent literature on the drivers of distributional change in developing countries is also reviewed.




The Oxford Handbook of Economic Inequality


Book Description

Comprehensive analysis of economic inequality in developed countries. The contributors give their view on the state-of-the-art scientific research in their fields and add their own visions of future research.




ECONOMIC INEQUALITY AND GROWTH A new look through Human Capital as you designed and shown


Book Description

This book tries to portray the link between economic inequality and long-run growth via human capital and the major take of the book is to analyze the growth panorama through the lens of the ‘idea’ or ‘knowledge’ generation’ which is eventually considered as the ‘engine of growth’ being fueled by productivity enhancement through the innovations of new technologies. But this is not the end of the story as it involves enormous controversies. Simply the controversy started with the basic question --- why are some countries richer than other countries? To put it in another way, why growth is a miracle, why it is not driven homogeneously for economies, or whether the economies would converge or not? Another issue is predominantly crucial, that is, economic inequality in the process of economic expansion. In this context, the present book has given emphasis in explaining the selective growth theories starting from classical foundation to new growth theories including their inner implications in the passage of history of economic growth. In consequence, the vast landscape of theoretical contours about political philosophies and model analyses of economic growth including diverse generic versions of the said link between economic expansion and distribution are explained, and, the most important feature of the textbook is that the link is explored by focusing on a single factor, human capital. The prime emphasis of the present textbook is to look at the link between growth, inequality and human capital accumulation and their resultant outcomes in a new way as New Look by substantiating the issue through empirical analyses relating to the Indian States. The whole journey of the book consists of the political philosophy, models and empirics, the trio, without which the all-around venture of economic theories would become incomplete. For this reason, the whole perspective of empirical analysis is done to keep in mind the necessities of the learners such that they should not feel awkward with a set of data. It is, in that context, the empirical and structural issues are taken up to make the issues distinctively clearer with the presumption that the whole perspective would become, then, more delightful and easy to digest.




Nonlinear Programming and Variational Inequality Problems


Book Description

Since I started working in the area of nonlinear programming and, later on, variational inequality problems, I have frequently been surprised to find that many algorithms, however scattered in numerous journals, monographs and books, and described rather differently, are closely related to each other. This book is meant to help the reader understand and relate algorithms to each other in some intuitive fashion, and represents, in this respect, a consolidation of the field. The framework of algorithms presented in this book is called Cost Approxi mation. (The preface of the Ph.D. thesis [Pat93d] explains the background to the work that lead to the thesis, and ultimately to this book.) It describes, for a given formulation of a variational inequality or nonlinear programming problem, an algorithm by means of approximating mappings and problems, a principle for the update of the iteration points, and a merit function which guides and monitors the convergence of the algorithm. One purpose of this book is to offer this framework as an intuitively appeal ing tool for describing an algorithm. One of the advantages of the framework, or any reasonable framework for that matter, is that two algorithms may be easily related and compared through its use. This framework is particular in that it covers a vast number of methods, while still being fairly detailed; the level of abstraction is in fact the same as that of the original problem statement.