The Bangladesh economy has undergone significant structural changes over the last four decades. The share of agriculture in GDP has declined, while the significance of industry and service sectors has increased. These structural changes have been...
Between 1981 and 2017, real gross domestic product in Thailand grew at an average annual rate of 5.7 per cent. Agricultural output grew more slowly than industry or services, and its gross domestic product share consequently declined. Industry’s...
This paper evaluates structural change, inequality dynamics, and industrial policy in South Africa between 1960 and the present day. We find that South Africa experienced growth-enhancing structural transformation until the early 1970s, before...
Earnings growth in South Africa displayed a U-shaped pattern across the earnings percentiles between 2000 and 2015, resembling wage polarization in the industrialized world. We investigate whether the drivers of this example of wage polarization in...
In this paper we use different sources of data on job task content to investigate the importance of occupations and the intensity of routine tasks embodied in them in explaining changes in employment and earnings in Brazil, in particular their...
Kanika Mahajan, a researcher engaged in UNU-WIDER's project on 'The changing nature of work and inequality', is the August 2021 featured economist of...
In summer 2020 the SOUTHMOD team set out, with partners, to analyse the impact of government policies on protecting households from getting poorer and...
How do crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic influence inequality and the other way around? This year’s UN Day Dresden put a spotlight on “Inequalities...
This article reviews the recent literature on the developmental effects of resource abundance, assessing likely effects and channels with respect to key development outcomes. To date, this area has received less analysis, although it is relevant to...
Among the many things said about the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is the description by the President of the UN General Assembly’s 70th...
This paper analyses the labour market dynamics in Indonesia from 2001 to 2015 and explores the role of the changing nature of occupational employment in explaining the rising earnings inequality during the same period. First, we find evidence of a...
This document is part of a series of technical notes describing the compilation of a new companion database that complements the World Income Inequality Database (WIID). It aims at facilitating the analysis of inequality as well as progress in...
This document is part of a series of technical notes describing the compilation of a new companion database that complements the World Income Inequality Database. It aims at facilitating the analysis of inequality as well as progress in achieving the...
This document is part of a series of technical notes describing the compilation of a new companion database that complements the UNU-WIDER World Income Inequality Database. It aims at facilitating the analysis of inequality as well as progress in...
This paper analyses how inequality across counties in the United States of America has shaped the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the incidence of protests.The empirical analysis combines weekly data between January and December 2020 on levels of...
We investigate the relevance of beta (β, absolute and conditional) and sigma (σ) convergence in the economies of the Common Monetary Area of Southern Africa and in the provinces of the Republic of South Africa using panel data, allowing an...
This paper makes use of tax–benefit microsimulation techniques to quantify the distributional effects of COVID-19 in Ecuador and the role of tax–benefit policies in mitigating the immediate impact of the economic shocks. Our results show a dramatic...
In 2016, the South African government introduced a comprehensive reform to simplify and harmonize the pension system in order to incentivize pension savings and increase the fairness of the retirement system. Using administrative tax micro-data, we...
The aim of this paper is to identify the scope and patterns of the structural transformation as evidenced by changes in occupations and their task content, and their impact on employment, earnings and income distribution in Argentina during the new...
Countering recent rises in many countries of inequality in income and wealth is widely recognized as a major development challenge. This is so from an ethical perspective and because greater inequality is perceived to be detrimental to key...
This document is part of a series of technical notes describing the compilation of a new companion database that complements the World Income Inequality Database (WIID). This technical note describes the first stage in constructing the new version...
This document is part of a series of technical notes describing the compilation of a new companion database that complements the World Income Inequality Database (WIID). A previous note described the selection of income distribution series. Since...
This document is part of a series of technical notes describing the compilation of a new companion database that complements the World Income Inequality Database (WIID). This technical note describes the construction of the global distribution...
Community or interpersonal support as a critical source of livelihood sustenance in the Global South can exhibit unequal dynamics. An understanding of these practices is primarily tied to the conceptual space of poverty or small communities. Less is...
Household incomes in Ecuador were badly hit by the pandemic, despite the government’s emergency grant to families. H Xavier Jara Tamayo (University of...
Overall income inequality in South Africa is very high, and inequality generated in the labour market is a key driver of inequality.In this paper, I use the Post-Apartheid Labour Market Series, the General Household Surveys, and administrative tax...
Using illustrations from research on inequality, this paper offers evidence on the strengths of ‘behavioural synthesis’, i.e. the reconciliation between neoclassical and behavioural economics.We compare how theoretical models of absolute and relative...
This study assesses the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and the state of emergency implemented by the Government of Mozambique on household consumption poverty. To predict changes in income and the associated effects on poverty and inequality, we...
There is a growing need to understand income inequality trends and how they interplay with other social, economic, and political outcomes, both at the...
Tax benefits to boost contributions into pension funds or pension-related tax expenditures (PTEs) are used widely by governments worldwide to address...
The COVID-19 pandemic delivered a devastating economic shock to livelihoods across the world. In Cape Town, it has been toughest on those who had just...
This study seeks to add to the research on inequality in least developed countries, namely in Mozambique, by measuring and mapping indicators of horizontal wealth inequality along geographic regions and ethnolinguistic identities. Using census data...
We examine the effects of randomly introduced economic inequality on voluntary cooperation, and whether this relationship is influenced by the quality of local institutions, as proxied by corruption. We use representative data from a large-scale lab...
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...
With structural changes in production coupled with technological progress, there have been shifts in modes of production and patterns of employment, with important consequences on task composition of occupations. This paper has utilized different...
Understanding the relationship between income inequality and economic growth is of utmost importance to economists and social scientists. In this paper we use a Bayesian structural vector autoregression approach to estimate the relationship between...
This paper identifies the socioeconomic drivers of earnings inequality in Peru in the period 2004–18. Using the ENAHO household surveys and data on routine task content of occupations, we apply inequality decomposition methods to the real earnings...
In this review, I provide an overview of the literature investigating the social psychology of economic inequality, focusing on individuals’ understandings, perceptions, and reactions to inequality. I begin by describing different ways of measuring...
A key debate in studies of native-migrant relations relates to the barriers to integration created by ethno-cultural differences and socio-economic disadvantage. How do changes in socio-economic inequality between ethnic groups affect interethnic...
Community support is a critical source to sustain livelihoods in the Global South. At the same time, these practices can exhibit unequal dynamics such as disincentives, hierarchies, or adverse inclusion of individuals. However, an understanding of...
This paper analyses the distributional effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and related tax-benefit measures in 2020 in a cross-country comparative perspective for five African countries: Ghana, Mozambique, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zambia. We first estimate...
Part of Book The Developer’s Dilemma
Part of Book The Developer’s Dilemma
Special Economic Zones (SEZs) have become common across Southern Africa in the past 20 years. In line with experiences in the rest of the world, they have had at best marginal success. Their essential premise is that it should be more efficient and...
Part of Book Social Mobility in Developing Countries
At the UNU-WIDER offices here in Helsinki, Finland, the summer holidays are almost upon us. Looking at the list of new UNU-WIDER publications, it is...
Part of Book Social Mobility in Developing Countries
While studies have examined the association in socioeconomic status between parent and offspring, there has been relatively little research on...
Since 1989, inequality in Mexico has risen, declined, and risen again. The evolution of labour income inequality is at the core of this pattern. To reverse the current trend of rising inequality, access to secondary and tertiary education should...
Following the introduction of economic reforms in the early 1990s, India today is achieving unprecedented per capita growth rates. Poverty reduction has also accelerated and is justly celebrated. There is great concern, however, that this growth is...
Countries face both challenges and opportunities in using their extractive industries to achieve more inclusive development—particularly in the developing world. Yet while a large national income can result from resource wealth, it can also be...
Studies of the spatial dimensions of inequality in developing countries are mostly restricted to states, provinces, or districts, typically the smallest geographical units for which data are representative in national surveys. We introduce a...
Productivity and socio-economic progress are inter-connected. Economic growth funds policies that promote socio-economic progress, while the latter serves as a growth engine. A society with high mobility is one where individual achievements are...
Income inequality in Mexico increased between 1989 and 1994; between 1994 and 2006, inequality declined; and, between 2006 and 2014, inequality was again on the rise. We apply decomposition techniques to analyse the proximate determinants of labour...
India today is achieving per capita growth rates that are historically unprecedented. Poverty reduction has also accelerated. There is concern, however, that this growth is being accompanied by rising inequality. We report on a research project that...
Redistributive systems in Africa are still in their infancy but are constantly expanding in order to finance increasing public spending. This paper aims at characterizing the redistributive potential of six African countries: Ghana, Zambia...
A substantial amount of research has been conducted examining inequality in South Africa using multiple data sources. We provide an overview of this research in this paper. Furthermore, we use nationally representative survey data to estimate income...
Over the years, money-metric measures of inequality such as the Gini coefficient and the Palma Ratio, as frequently used in Ghana, have become useful in providing quantitative measures of welfare distribution that enable a better understanding of the...
Using illustrations from research on inequality, this essay makes a case for ‘behavioural synthesis’, that is the reconciliation between neo-classical and behavioural economics. Focusing on selected theories of absolute and relative inequality, we...
Research on how income inequality affects borrowing behaviour reignited after the 2008 global recession. One prevailing theory is that rising income...
The famous 1920s book The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, is the classic analogy for the American dream of meritocracy —that any person can...
This paper employs k-means clustering, a multidimensional pattern recognition method, to categorize countries using information from five Varieties of Democracy indices. K-means country clusters are similar but not entirely identical to both k...
Establishing an equitable and efficient tax system is essential for reducing poverty, combating inequality, and fostering sustainable economic growth. Rwanda’s government has recognized this and implemented significant changes to the personal income...
Reducing poverty and inequality and promoting inclusive growth are fundamental to achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), approved by the UN General Assembly in September 2015. The first target of SDG1 is to eradicate extreme poverty...
What is the relationship between inequality and growth? This question has occupied and fascinated social scientists for more than a century. This chapter critically reviews the recent empirical and theoretical literature on the complex interplay...
Better understanding of inequality, including its relationship to governance and other key outcomes, is relevant both to academic researchers and to policy-makers. Nevertheless, efforts to establish causal relationships empirically remain hampered by...
This paper analyses the effectiveness of tax-benefit systems in reducing poverty and inequality across 13 countries in the Global South. Using national survey data and tax-benefit microsimulation models from the SOUTHMOD project, we provide a cross...
With several violent conflicts around the world weighing heavily on our minds, we attended the 27th WIDER Annual Lecture. Dr. Pinelopi Goldberg’s...
The debate over universal basic income (UBI) has gained traction in the developing world in recent years. We analyse the effects of four UBI schemes on poverty and inequality measures during normal times and times of crisis in Uganda and Zambia. We...
Concerns about widening income inequality within countries continue to gain prominence in public debate worldwide. In the last decade, attention to the concentration of income at the very top of the distribution (top 1%) has increased. This...
The ethnographic approach has much to contribute to our understanding of social mobility.This paper provides a discussion on ethnography as a method and approach to writing and description, and reviews some ways in which themes related to social...
Monitoring health is key for identifying priorities in public health planning and improving healthcare services. Life expectancy has conventionally been regarded as a valuable indicator to compare the health status of different populations. However...
This paper investigates the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and related tax-benefit measures in Viet Nam. The focus is on the initial phase of the crisis in 2020. The study delves into how the pandemic affected disposable incomes, examining the...
In this paper, we present new projections for a range of global poverty-related Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), specifically, extreme monetary poverty, undernutrition, stunting, child mortality, maternal mortality, and access to clean water and...
This publication examines the process of economic development of the last 50 years or so under the neoliberal model in terms of impacts on growth, inflation, income and wealth distribution and structural change. The analysis includes a historical...
We examine the distributional effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and associated tax-benefit measures in seven sub-Saharan African countries, focusing on the onset of the crisis.We evaluate impacts on disposable incomes, considering variations across...
Household budget surveys in sub-Saharan Africa are designed to facilitate poverty measurement and may fail to fully capture consumption in wealthy households. As a result, inequality is likely underestimated. We address upper tier consumption...
Engagement is needed at all levels to address ongoing inequality faced in South Africa. This was the primary aim of a recent policy seminar in...
Part of Journal Special Issue Legal Empowerment and Group-Based Inequality
This paper is essentially autobiographical and describes Erik Thorbecke’s journey through the history of development economics between the 1950s and the present. The paper consists of four parts. First, an introduction reviews briefly his...
Labour-saving technology in the form of robotic systems, artificial intelligence, and advanced computer networks may cause a rapid decline in global...
What do we talk about at a conference on development economics? Well, robots, rockets, and space, of course. 13 September through 15 September 2018...
This study takes as its starting point what Gunnar Myrdal had to say about Vietnam in the context of his seminal work, Asian Drama: An Inquiry into the Poverty of Nations, published in 1968. Myrdal pointed to the decisive nature of the Vietnamese...
This paper develops a new imputation methodology applied to missing incomes values in PNAD. PNAD is the main Brazilian household survey, but it has no imputation. The imputation process starts by fitting regression models applied to different income...
This paper analyses the dramatic spread of education and healthcare in Asia and also the large variations in that spread across and within countries over 50 years. Apart from differences in initial conditions and income levels, the nature of the...
The story of South Asia is a topsy-turvy one. Soon after independence from British rule, the region seemed to have a much better prospect than many other parts of the Third World; the prospects soon dimmed, however, as South Asia crawled while East...
Sitting in the large conference room where we are being invited to ‘Think WIDER’ at the WIDER Development Conference this September. Surrounded by...
Part of Journal Special Issue Horizontal Inequality: Persistence and Change
We study the trajectory of the gender gap over time and over the life cycle, using a matched employer-employee data from the formal labour market in Brazil. We document the evolution of participation and earnings for both males and females during the...
This paper documents the evolution and the determinants of earnings inequality in the Brazilian formal sector from 1994 to 2015, using establishment level data. In 2015, schooling explained 33 per cent of overall inequality. Firm-specific effects...
Reducing gender inequality is a critically important development challenge, especially in countries with widespread and deep-rooted prejudices against women. In this study, we use a randomized control trial to examine whether facilitating Vietnamese...
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...
The first democratic elections in 1994 brought about the promise for equal opportunity and an overall improvement of living standards for the majority of the South African population. However, 20 years after the democratization of South Africa...
We here use repeated cross-section data from the Afrobarometer, Asianbarometer Latinobarometer, and Eurobarometer to analyse the variables that are correlated with both current and future evaluations of standards of living. These are related not only...
In this paper we describe the major trends in China’s income inequality over the past 40 years and explain them as the outcome of four interleaved stories. The first story is a standard development story characterized by structural change, market...
We analyse the evolution and proximate determinants of labour income inequality in Mexico between 1989 and 2017. Labour income inequality increased between 1989 and 1994 and declined between 1994 and 2006. What happened after 2006 is subject to...
This paper provides a broad picture of national, regional and global trends of inequality in length of life over the period 1950–2015. We use data on life tables from World Population Prospects to develop a comprehensive database of a battery of...
This paper uses income and expenditure surveys from 1992 to 2014 and public tax and spending accounts to estimate the redistributive impact of Mexico’s fiscal system over this period. It presents standard and marginal benefit incidence analysis for...
Many low- and middle-income countries are achieving good rates of economic growth, while high inequality remains a priority concern. Some countries meanwhile have low growth, high inequality, and pervasive poverty—often linked to their fragility...
Part of Journal Special Issue Inequality
In this paper, I quantify the contribution of a subpopulation to inequality. This is defined as the sum of the contributions of its members, with these contributions computed as the impact on inequality of a small increase in the population mass at...
Governments’ revenues are lower when multinational enterprises avoid paying corporate income tax by shifting their profits to tax havens. In this paper, we ask which countries’ tax revenues are affected most by this tax avoidance and how much. To...
How do changes in socio-economic inequality between ethnic groups affect interethnic ties in a divided society? I analyse the evolution of cross-ethnic marriages in a society affected by violence along ethnic boundaries and make three principal...
In this paper, we investigate the long-term trend of consumption inequality in Mozambique. We show that an imbalanced growth path disproportionally benefited the better-off and caused increasing inequality, especially in more recent years, curbing...
This paper examines the patterns and trends in inter-state migration across Indian states and observes that migration is affected by demographic profile as well as the fiscal profile of states. Econometric estimation suggests that level of vertical...
In very poor countries, inequality often means that a small part of the population maintains living standards far above the rest. This is also true for educational inequality in Mozambique: only a small segment of the population has access to higher...
Part of Journal Special Issue Fiscal Policy, State Building and Economic Development
Legal empowerment has become widely accepted in development policy circles as an approach to addressing poverty and exclusion. At the same time, it has received relatively little attention from political scientists and sociologists working on...
Inequality and social exclusion receive considerable contemporary policy attention. In the field of international development, inequality—both vertical (between individuals and households) and horizontal (between groups)—is a core concern in the 2030...
Tax havens have become a defining feature of the global financial system. Multinational companies can use various schemes to avoid paying taxes in...
Part of Journal Special Issue Public economics and development action
Inequality—both vertical (between individuals and households) and horizontal (between groups)—is a core concern in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. However, despite considerable attention to horizontal inequality in both research and...
Part of Journal Special Issue Migration Governance and Policy in the Global South
For the first time in Indonesia, we jointly analyse several economic statistics and ethnic diversity indicators at national and local levels. Nationally, we find very high levels of economic inequality, measured from household asset values or...
There is scant analysis on the causal relationship between fiscal capacity and social protection expenditure in the developing world. We investigate the causal relationship between fiscal capacity of the state and social protection expenditure...
Efforts to tackle discrimination in access to basic services have shown mixed results in different country settings. This study examines the positive and negative outcomes attributed to anti-discrimination measures adopted in different country...
With the second largest indigenous population by percentage in Latin America, Guatemala is an important case for understanding horizontal inequality and indigenous politics. This paper presents new analysis of survey data, allowing for consideration...
Whereas most research into microfinance tends to focus on the impact of access to such services, very little pays attention to what happens over time once a person becomes a client. The paper aims at analysing the conditions of loan renewals as most...
When UNU-WIDER was founded, and I was privileged to be associated with the research being undertaken by the new institute—the main challenges of...
US President Donald Trump wants to build a wall along the US-Mexican border. Britain wants to retreat into its shell to become an isolated island...
The debate on whether democracy and inequality increase the level of redistribution is ongoing. We construct a model that predicts higher probability of redistribution in democracies than autocracies through social transfers. Higher inequality leads...
Developing countries face a trade-off between the twin objectives of structural transformation and inclusive growth. This is the ‘developer’s dilemma’. This study analyses the dilemma as it manifested itself in the Indian context, and identifies two...
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...
In this paper, we analyse the relationship between China’s structural transformation and the inclusiveness of its economic growth. China’s economy has undergone significant structural changes since it initiated the economic reforms in 1978. Economic...
This study re-examines the determinants of redistribution in light of improved data and methods relative to earlier literature. In particular, we use the latest version of the UNU‐WIDER’s Income Inequality Database to have the best available...
The COVID-19 pandemic represents an unprecedented global crisis. The task for economic policy is to help keep people alive, enterprises afloat, and households out of poverty. The pandemic has macroeconomic dimensions. First, it affects macroeconomic...
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...
Students’ expectations about their future wages are established in the literature as relevant determinants of the choices made for education progression and, at the university level, for the area and course to be studied. In this paper, the first...
Inequality has emerged as a key development challenge. It holds implications for economic growth and redistribution and translates into power asymmetries that can endanger human rights, create conflict, and embed social exclusion and chronic poverty...
Part of Book Inequality in the Developing World
Part of Book Inequality in the Developing World
In this study, I quantify the contribution of a subpopulation to inequality. This is defined as the sum of the contributions of its members, with these contributions computed as the impact on inequality of a small increase in the population mass at...
An influential paper by Berg et al., ‘Redistribution, inequality, and growth: new evidence’, uses the SWIID data to examine the impact of inequality and redistribution on growth in both developing and developed countries. It finds that while...
Migration is an inherent feature of human history. A rich literature considers the experiences of global migrants across diverse environments. This special issue explores such experiences with a focus on inequality between migrants and host...
In this paper, we use the World Income Inequality Database to assess the main trends in inequality within countries since around 1990. We cope with the heterogeneity in the original information (regarding the measure of resources, equivalence scale...
Part of Journal Special Issue Involuntary Migration, Inequality, and Integration
This paper investigates the long-term impact of economic shocks on populism, by exploiting a natural experiment created by the trade liberalization process implemented in Brazil between 1990 and 1995. This high impact and low duration event generated...
Inequality in South Africa is the enduring legacy of racial discrimination. We use a dynamic perspective to show the linkages between persistent effects of discrimination in the labour market and the efficacy of redistributive fiscal policy in...
This paper reviews the recent literature on the developmental effects of resource abundance, assessing likely effects and channels with respect to income inequality, poverty, education, and health. To date, this area has received less analysis...
There is an increasing interest in the analysis of economic inequalities in least developed countries. This is not only the result of a general social preference for equality, but also the consequence of a growing sense that highly unequal societies...
Across the world, we observe different experiences in terms of inequality between migrant and ‘host-country’ populations. What factors contribute to such variation? What policies and programmes facilitate ‘better’ economic integration? This paper...
We examine the Kuznets postulate that structural transformation leads to higher inequality using comparable panel data for a large number of developing and developed countries for 1960–2012. Countries are in different stages of structural...
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