Millions of South Africans in thousands of demonstrations have protested the unequal allocation of public services. Despite the African National Congress’s promise to reduce the disparities generated by apartheid, the level of public services remains...
The impact of medical deductions and medical credits on income inequality is a subject of discussion in South Africa, as well as in many other countries, raising critical questions about the fairness of the medical tax system and the impact on...
Much work has been done on inequality in South Africa, but to date the literature that assesses the dynamic response of income or wealth distribution to economic policy actions is almost non-existent. This information gap is caused by data...
This paper examines the causes of conflict in Burundi and discusses strategies for building peace. The analysis of the complex relationships between distribution and group dynamics reveals that these relationships are reciprocal, implying that...
This paper studies the postwar economic and political reconstruction in Lebanon. The paper shows that the ‘reconstruction boom’ was short-lived. The economy experienced a growth trap early in the reconstruction period, and entered a cyclical crisis...
There are two main types of data sources of income distributions in China: household survey data and grouped data. Household survey data are typically available for isolated years and individual provinces. In comparison, aggregate or grouped data are...
The United Nations Millennium Declaration commits to halving extreme poverty between 2000 and 2015. The South African government has set a goal of halving poverty by 2014, although the meaning of this goal has not yet been defined. This article...
This paper relates Amartya Sen’s capability approach to the literature on equivalence scales. Synthetic indicators of well-being are constructed by adjusting individual incomes for differences in functionings. An exploratory comparative application...
This paper is the first to compare global trends in income and wealth inequality this century. It is based on large income and wealth microdata samples designed to be representative of all countries in the world.Measured by the Gini coefficient...
I use a dynamic microsimulation model to analyse the distributional effects of an expansion of education in Côte d’Ivoire in the medium and long term. The simulations are performed in order to replicate several policies in force or subject to debate...
The capabilities approach has emphasized that inequalities can be analyzed in various dimensions of human functioning. Indicators of these inequalities can be incorporated into assessments of well-being. The capabilities approach also highlights the...
Tony Addison As autumn moves into winter in Helsinki, it is time to bring you the October edition of UNU-WIDER’s newsletter, WIDER Angle. Regular...
The role of agriculture in development remains much debated. This paper takes an empirical perspective and focuses on poverty, as opposed to growth alone. The contribution of a sector to poverty reduction is shown to depend on its own growth...
This paper documents the convergence of incomes across Indian states over the period 1965 to 1998. It departs from traditional analyses of convergence by tracking the evolution of the entire income distribution, instead of standard regression and...
Part of Book Utility Privatization and Regulation
Part of Journal Special Issue Inequality and Multidimensional Well-being
Part of Journal Special Issue Inequality and Poverty in China
Part of Book Perspectives on Growth and Poverty
The recent National Health Insurance White Paper proposes redirection of medical tax credits revenue towards the financing of the national health insurance.This raises critical questions about the impact on affordability for the poor as well as...
This paper investigates the validity of household survey data published by Statistics South Africa since 1993 and later integrated into the Post-Apartheid Labour Market Series (PALMS).A series of statistical adjustments are proposed, compared, and...
This paper aims at providing new evidence over the effect of conventional monetary policy shocks on wage inequality through the earnings heterogeneity channel under the inflation-targeting regime implemented in South Africa since 2000.The empirical...
Part of Book Inequality in the Developing World
In order to track progress in MDG1 and explicitly link growth, inequality, and poverty reduction, several measures of ‘pro-poor growth’ have been proposed in the literature and used in applied academic and policy work. These measures, particularly...
This paper assesses the feasibility of simulating the distributional impacts produced by various tax and transfer instruments in Vietnam. Vietnam’s system of tax and transfer policies underwent frequent changes, in terms of diversity and adjustment...
The UK was one of the earliest countries to undertake utility reform, which included changes in ownership, in the regulatory regime and in market structure and competition. While most agree that the programme has had beneficial effects on efficiency...
India addressed the requirement for pro-poor service delivery in rural regions by introducing decentralization and affirmative action policies. In order to measure the social preferences of local decision makers, we conducted field experiments which...
In a significant number of developing countries, revenue from the sale of a few natural resources accounts for the vast majority of export earnings and a large share of total government revenue. As a result, the allocation of revenue from natural...
Based on the standard axiom of individual utility maximization, rational choice has postulated that higher income inequality translates into greater redistribution by shaping the median voter’s preferences. While numerous papers have tested this...
The role of agriculture in development remains much debated. This paper takes an empirical perspective and focuses on poverty, as opposed to growth alone. The contribution of a sector to poverty reduction is shown to depend on its own growth...
Part of Journal Special Issue Poverty, Development, and Behavioral Economics
The privatization of the national public utilities that took place almost a decade ago in Argentina seem to be explained by the persisting deficits of the enterprises, a general dissatisfaction with their performance and the difficulties government...
I model life expectancy in terms of physical and human capital and technology, the fundamental economic variables described by economic growth theories. For concreteness, the Solow model and a convergence club growth model by Howitt and Mayer (2001)...
Part of Journal Special Issue Conflict and Peace-building
Part of Book Achieving the Millennium Development Goals
Part of Book Understanding Human Well-being
Part of Book From Shock to Therapy
Join the network
