Author: Mr.Jonathan David Ostry
Publisher: International Monetary Fund
ISBN: 1484397657
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 30
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Book Description
The Fund has recognized in recent years that one cannot separate issues of economic growth and stability on one hand and equality on the other. Indeed, there is a strong case for considering inequality and an inability to sustain economic growth as two sides of the same coin. Central to the Fund’s mandate is providing advice that will enable members’ economies to grow on a sustained basis. But the Fund has rightly been cautious about recommending the use of redistributive policies given that such policies may themselves undercut economic efficiency and the prospects for sustained growth (the so-called “leaky bucket” hypothesis written about by the famous Yale economist Arthur Okun in the 1970s). This SDN follows up the previous SDN on inequality and growth by focusing on the role of redistribution. It finds that, from the perspective of the best available macroeconomic data, there is not a lot of evidence that redistribution has in fact undercut economic growth (except in extreme cases). One should be careful not to assume therefore—as Okun and others have—that there is a big tradeoff between redistribution and growth. The best available macroeconomic data do not support such a conclusion.
Author: Mr.Benedict J. Clements
Publisher: International Monetary Fund
ISBN: 1513567756
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 450
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Book Description
The sizeable increase in income inequality experienced in advanced economies and many parts of the world since the 1990s and the severe consequences of the global economic and financial crisis have brought distributional issues to the top of the policy agenda. The challenge for many governments is to address concerns over rising inequality while simultaneously promoting economic efficiency and more robust economic growth. The book delves into this discussion by analyzing fiscal policy and its link with inequality. Fiscal policy is the government’s most powerful tool for addressing inequality. It affects households ‘consumption directly (through taxes and transfers) and indirectly (via incentives for work and production and the provision of public goods and individual services such as education and health). An important message of the book is that growth and equity are not necessarily at odds; with the appropriate mix of policy instruments and careful policy design, countries can in many cases achieve better distributional outcomes and improve economic efficiency. Country studies (on the Netherlands, China, India, Republic of Congo, and Brazil) demonstrate the diversity of challenges across countries and their differing capacity to use fiscal policy for redistribution. The analysis presented in the book builds on and extends work done at the IMF, and also includes contributions from leading academics.
Author: Leslie McCall
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107355230
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 319
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Book Description
It is widely assumed that Americans care little about income inequality, believe opportunities abound, admire the rich, and dislike redistributive policies. Leslie McCall contends that such assumptions are based on both incomplete survey data and economic conditions of the past and not present. In fact, Americans have desired less inequality for decades, and McCall's book explains why. Americans become most concerned about inequality in times of inequitable growth, when they view the rich as prospering while opportunities for good jobs, fair pay and high quality education are restricted for everyone else. As a result, they favor policies to expand opportunity and redistribute earnings in the workplace, reducing inequality in the market rather than redistributing income after the fact with tax and spending policies. This book resolves the paradox of how Americans can express little enthusiasm for welfare state policies and still yearn for a more equitable society, and forwards a new model of preferences about income inequality rooted in labor market opportunities rather than welfare state policies.
Author: Roger D. Congleton
Publisher:
ISBN: 0190469773
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 1017
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Book Description
The Oxford Handbook of Public Choice provides a comprehensive overview of the research in economics, political science, law, and sociology that has generated considerable insight into the politics of democratic and authoritarian systems as well as the influence of different institutional frameworks on incentives and outcomes. The result is an improved understanding of public policy, public finance, industrial organization, and macroeconomics as the combination of political and economic analysis shed light on how various interests compete both within a given rules of the games and, at times, to change the rules. These volumes include analytical surveys, syntheses, and general overviews of the many subfields of public choice focusing on interesting, important, and at times contentious issues. Throughout the focus is on enhancing understanding how political and economic systems act and interact, and how they might be improved. Both volumes combine methodological analysis with substantive overviews of key topics. This second volume examines constitutional political economy and also various applications, including public policy, international relations, and the study of history, as well as methodological and measurement issues. Throughout both volumes important analytical concepts and tools are discussed, including their application to substantive topics. Readers will gain increased understanding of rational choice and its implications for collective action; various explanations of voting, including economic and expressive; the role of taxation and finance in government dynamics; how trust and persuasion influence political outcomes; and how revolution, coups, and authoritarianism can be explained by the same set of analytical tools as enhance understanding of the various forms of democracy.
Author: Gordon Tullock
Publisher: Selected Works of Gordon Tullo
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 492
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Book Description
The Economics of Politics is the fourth volume in Liberty Fund's The Selected Works of Gordon Tullock. This volume includes some of Gordon Tullock's most noteworthy contributions to the theory and application of public choice, which is a relatively new science that links economics and political action. This volume combines the best parts of two of his books, Private Wants: Public Means and On Voting, as well as his famous monograph The Vote Motive. The common thread of The Economics of Politics is the importance of the bond between Homo politicus and Homo economicus: they are the same species, each driven largely by self-interest in vigorous pursuit of such personal objectives as wealth, power, prestige, and income security within the confines of society. The Economics of Politics covers such diverse public choice topics as: the nature and origins of public choice, the power of using economic analysis to understand and predict the behavior of politically influenced markets, and an evaluation of voting rules and political institutions. Equally confident in both the normative and the positive branches of the discipline, and well-versed in the wide variety of institutions and practices of democracy throughout history, Tullock takes the reader on a journey that goes well beyond the conventional horizon of public choice. Gordon Tullock is Professor Emeritus of Law at George Mason University, where he was Distinguished Research Fellow in the Center for Study of Public Choice and University Professor of Law and Economics. He also taught at the University of South Carolina, the University of Virginia, Rice University, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, and the University of Arizona. In 1966 he founded the journal that became Public Choice and remained its editor until 1990. Charles K. Rowley was Duncan Black Professor of Economics at George Mason University and a Senior Fellow of the James M. Buchanan Center for Political Economy at George Mason University. He was also General Director of the Locke Institute.
Author: Merike Blofield
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271050098
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 418
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Book Description
"A collection of essays addressing the relationship between inequality and politics in Latin America. Examines the socioeconomic context and inequality of opportunities; elite culture, public opinion, and media framing; capital mobility, campaign financing, representation and gender equality policies; and taxation and social policies"--Provided by publisher.
Author: Pranab K. Bardhan
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 9780691125190
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 352
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Book Description
Demonstrates that the free flow of goods, capital, and labor has increased the inequality or volatility of labor earnings in advanced industrial societies, while constraining governments' ability to tax the winners to compensate the workers for their loss. This book looks at how globalization affects policies aimed at reducing inequalities.
Author: Anthony B. Atkinson
Publisher: North Holland
ISBN: 9780444816313
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 938
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Book Description
Distributional issues may not have always been among the main concerns of the economic profession. Today, in the beginning of the 2000s, the position is different. During the last quarter of a century, economic growth proved to be unsteady and rather slow on average. The situation of those at the bottom ceased to improve regularly as in the preceding fast growth and full-employment period. Europe has seen prolonged unemployment and there has been widening wage dispersion in a number of OECD countries. Rising affluence in rich countries coexists, in a number of such countries, with the persistence of poverty. As a consequence, it is difficult nowadays to think of an issue ranking high in the public economic debate without some strong explicit distributive implications. Monetary policy, fiscal policy, taxes, monetary or trade union, privatisation, price and competition regulation, the future of the Welfare State are all issues which are now often perceived as conflictual because of their strong redistributive content. Economists have responded quickly to the renewed general interest in distribution, and the contents of this Handbook are very different from those which would have been included had it been written ten or twenty years ago. It has now become common to have income distribution variables playing a pivotal role in economic models. The recent interest in the relationship between growth and distribution is a good example of this. The surge of political economy in the contemporary literature is also a route by which distribution is coming to re-occupy the place it deserves. Within economics itself, the development of models of imperfect information and informational asymmetries have not only provided a means of resolving the puzzle as to why identical workers get paid different amounts, but have also caused reconsideration of the efficiency of market outcomes. These models indicate that there may not necessarily be an efficiency/equity trade-off; it may be possible to make progress on both fronts. The introduction and subsequent 14 chapters of this Handbook cover in detail all these new developments, insisting at the same time on how they tie with the previous literature on income distribution. The overall perspective is intentionally broad. As with landscapes, adopting various points of view on a given issue may often be the only way of perceiving its essence or reality. Accordingly, income distribution issues in the various chapters of this volume are considered under their theoretical or their empirical side, under a normative or a positive angle, in connection with redistribution policy, in a micro or macro-economic context, in different institutional settings, at various point of space, in a historical or contemporaneous perspective. Specialized readers will go directly to the chapter dealing with the issue or using the approach they are interested in. For them, this Handbook will be a clear and sure reference. To more patient readers who will go through various chapters of this volume, this Handbook should provide the multi-faceted view that seems necessary for a deep understanding of most issues in the field of distribution. For more information on the Handbooks in Economics series, please see our home page on http://www.elsevier.nl/locate/hes
Author: Marcos Mendes
Publisher: Academic Press
ISBN: 0128019654
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 281
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Book Description
In terms accessible to non-economists, Marcos José Mendes describes the ways democracy and inequality produce low growth in the short and medium terms. In the longer term, he argues that Brazil has two paths in front of it. One is to create the conditions necessary to boost economic performance and drive the country toward a high level of development. The other is to fail in untying the political knot that blocks growth, leaving it a middle-income country. The source of his contrasting futures for Brazil is inequality, which he demonstrates is a relevant variable in any discussion of economic growth. Inequality illuminates causes of seemingly-unconnected problems. This book, which includes freely-accessible documents and datasets, is the first in-depth analysis of an issue that promises to become increasingly prominent. - Contrasting visions of Brazil's future described in economic terms - Easy-to-understand graphs and tables illustrate analytical arguments - All Excel-based data available on a freely-accessible website
Author: International Monetary Fund
Publisher: International Monetary Fund
ISBN: 1498343678
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 69
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Book Description
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