Author: Carlos Góes
Publisher: International Monetary Fund
ISBN: 1475523246
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 27
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Book Description
Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century puts forth a logically consistent explanation for changes in income and wealth inequality patterns. However, while rich in data, the book provides no formal empirical testing for its theoretical causal chain. In this paper, I build a set of Panel SVAR models to check if inequality and capital share in the national income move up as the r-g gap grows. Using a sample of 19 advanced economies spanning over 30 years, I find no empirical evidence that dynamics move in the way Piketty suggests. Results are robust to several alternative estimates of r-g.
Author: Heather Boushey
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 067497817X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 688
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Book Description
Are Thomas Piketty’s analyses of inequality on target? Where should researchers go from here in exploring the ideas he pushed to the forefront of global conversation? In After Piketty, a cast of economists and other social scientists tackle these questions in dialogue with Piketty, in what is sure to be a much-debated book in its own right.
Author: Nick Eberstadt
Publisher: American Enterprise Institute
ISBN: 9780844771694
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 60
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Book Description
Few would take exception to the proposition that an improvement in the material well-being of the poor would enhance not only their living standards but their health as well. A number of influential recent studies, however, purport to show that inequality in income -- not poverty per se -- is bad for people's health. This "inequality hypothesis" is meant to apply to everyone, regardless of wealth or social standing, and predicts that the risk of illness depends upon whether one lives in a society that is stratified or egalitarian. Thus, according to this hypothesis, while the poor may suffer the most from inequality, the better off and even the rich suffer as well. The enthusiasm many researchers and observers feel for this theory goes well beyond what might be justified by the evidence. The inequality hypothesis too often relies upon limited or unrepresentative data, hazily expounded causality, elementary econometric fallacies, and results that cannot be replicated. A very persuasive (although less publicly heralded) body of scholarship that challenges the inequality hypothesis is currently emerging. For example, by controlling for relevant variables -- such as household income, maternal characteristics, education, and race -- the relationship between income inequality and the health of infants and adults diminishes or disappears completely. This strongly suggests that income distribution is far less powerful a determinant of population health than the inequality hypothesis holds. Book jacket.
Author: Thomas Piketty
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674504801
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 153
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Book Description
Succinct, accessible, and authoritative, Thomas Piketty’s The Economics of Inequality is the ideal place to start for those who want to understand the fundamental issues at the heart of one the most pressing concerns in contemporary economics and politics. This work now appears in English for the first time.
Author: Thomas Piketty
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674979850
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 817
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Book Description
What are the grand dynamics that drive the accumulation and distribution of capital? Questions about the long-term evolution of inequality, the concentration of wealth, and the prospects for economic growth lie at the heart of political economy. But satisfactory answers have been hard to find for lack of adequate data and clear guiding theories. In this work the author analyzes a unique collection of data from twenty countries, ranging as far back as the eighteenth century, to uncover key economic and social patterns. His findings transform debate and set the agenda for the next generation of thought about wealth and inequality. He shows that modern economic growth and the diffusion of knowledge have allowed us to avoid inequalities on the apocalyptic scale predicted by Karl Marx. But we have not modified the deep structures of capital and inequality as much as we thought in the optimistic decades following World War II. The main driver of inequality--the tendency of returns on capital to exceed the rate of economic growth--today threatens to generate extreme inequalities that stir discontent and undermine democratic values if political action is not taken. But economic trends are not acts of God. Political action has curbed dangerous inequalities in the past, the author says, and may do so again. This original work reorients our understanding of economic history and confronts us with sobering lessons for today.
Author: Mr.Shekhar Aiyar
Publisher: International Monetary Fund
ISBN: 1484396987
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 23
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Book Description
We posit that the relationship between income inequality and economic growth is mediated by the level of equality of opportunity, which we identify with intergenerational mobility. In economies characterized by intergenerational rigidities, an increase in income inequality has persistent effects—for example by hindering human capital accumulation— thereby retarding future growth disproportionately. We use several recently developed internationally comparable measures of intergenerational mobility to confirm that the negative impact of income inequality on growth is higher the lower is intergenerational mobility. Our results suggest that omitting intergenerational mobility leads to misspecification, shedding light on why the empirical literature on income inequality and growth has been so inconclusive.
Author: Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780198041535
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 496
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Book Description
Understanding poverty and what to do about it, is perhaps the central concern of all of economics. Yet the lay public almost never gets to hear what leading professional economists have to say about it. This volume brings together twenty-eight essays by some of the world leaders in the field, who were invited to tell the lay reader about the most important things they have learnt from their research that relate to poverty. The essays cover a wide array of topics: the first essay is about how poverty gets measured. The next section is about the causes of poverty and its persistence, and the ideas range from the impact of colonialism and globalization to the problems of "excessive" population growth, corruption and ethnic conflict. The next section is about policy: how should we fight poverty? The essays discuss how to get drug companies to produce more vaccines for the diseases of the poor, what we should and should not expect from micro-credit, what we should do about child labor, how to design welfare policies that work better and a host of other topics. The final section is about where the puzzles lie: what are the most important anomalies, the big gaps in the way economists think about poverty? The essays talk about the puzzling reluctance of Kenyan farmers to fertilizers, the enduring power of social relationships in economic transactions in developing countries and the need to understand where aspirations come from, and much else. Every essay is written with the aim of presenting the latest and the most sophisticated in economics without any recourse to jargon or technical language.
Author: Claudia Goldin
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674037731
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 496
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Book Description
This book provides a careful historical analysis of the co-evolution of educational attainment and the wage structure in the United States through the twentieth century. The authors propose that the twentieth century was not only the American Century but also the Human Capital Century. That is, the American educational system is what made America the richest nation in the world. Its educational system had always been less elite than that of most European nations. By 1900 the U.S. had begun to educate its masses at the secondary level, not just in the primary schools that had remarkable success in the nineteenth century. The book argues that technological change, education, and inequality have been involved in a kind of race. During the first eight decades of the twentieth century, the increase of educated workers was higher than the demand for them. This had the effect of boosting income for most people and lowering inequality. However, the reverse has been true since about 1980. This educational slowdown was accompanied by rising inequality. The authors discuss the complex reasons for this, and what might be done to ameliorate it.
Author: Facundo Alvaredo
Publisher: Belknap Press
ISBN: 0674984552
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 345
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Book Description
World Inequality Report 2018 is the most authoritative and up-to-date account of global trends in inequality. Researched, compiled, and written by a team of the world's leading economists of inequality, it presents--with unrivaled clarity and depth--information and analysis that will be vital to policy makers and scholars everywhere. Inequality has taken center stage in public debate as the wealthiest people in most parts of the world have seen their share of the economy soar relative to that of others, many of whom, especially in the West, have experienced stagnation. The resulting political and social pressures have posed harsh new challenges for governments and created a pressing demand for reliable data. The World Inequality Lab at the Paris School of Economics and the University of California, Berkeley, has answered this call by coordinating research into the latest trends in the accumulation and distribution of income and wealth on every continent. This inaugural report analyzes the Lab's findings, which include data from major countries where information has traditionally been difficult to acquire, such as China, India, and Brazil. Among nations, inequality has been decreasing as traditionally poor countries' economies have caught up with the West. The report shows, however, that inequality has been steadily deepening within almost every nation, though national trajectories vary, suggesting the importance of institutional and policy frameworks in shaping inequality. World Inequality Report 2018 will be a key document for anyone concerned about one of the most imperative and contentious subjects in contemporary politics and economics.
Author: Ms. Era Dabla-Norris
Publisher: International Monetary Fund
ISBN: 1513547437
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 33
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Book Description
This paper analyzes the extent of income inequality from a global perspective, its drivers, and what to do about it. The drivers of inequality vary widely amongst countries, with some common drivers being the skill premium associated with technical change and globalization, weakening protection for labor, and lack of financial inclusion in developing countries. We find that increasing the income share of the poor and the middle class actually increases growth while a rising income share of the top 20 percent results in lower growth—that is, when the rich get richer, benefits do not trickle down. This suggests that policies need to be country specific but should focus on raising the income share of the poor, and ensuring there is no hollowing out of the middle class. To tackle inequality, financial inclusion is imperative in emerging and developing countries while in advanced economies, policies should focus on raising human capital and skills and making tax systems more progressive.
