Working Paper
Is inequality underestimated in Mozambique?
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...
Blog
Taking steps to overcome inequality in South Africa
by
Carlos Gradín
June 2017
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...
Working Paper
Global inequality in length of life, 1950–2015
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...
Working Paper
Inequality and fiscal redistribution in Mexico
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...
Journal Special Issue
Inequality
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...
Journal Article
Inequality
Part of Journal Special Issue
Inequality
Journal Article
Global inequality
Part of Journal Special Issue
Inequality
Working Paper
Inequality, ethnicity, and social cohesion
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...
Working Paper
Labour income inequality in Mexico
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...
Working Paper
Quantifying the contribution of a subpopulation to 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...
Working Paper
Estimating the scale of profit shifting and tax revenue losses related to foreign direct investment
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...
Working Paper
Extractives for development
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...
Working Paper
The gender gap, education, and the life cycle profile in the Brazilian formal labour market
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...
Working Paper
Earnings inequality in the Brazilian formal sector
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...
Working Paper
Changing male perceptions of gender equality
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...
Working Paper
Comparing global inequality of income and wealth
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...
Working Paper
Drivers of inequality in South Africa
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...
Working Paper
Economic inequality and subjective well-being across the world
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...
Working Paper
Inequality in China
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...
Working Paper
Investigating growing inequality in Mozambique
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...
Working Paper
Fiscal pressure of migration and horizontal fiscal inequality
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...
Working Paper
Educational inequality in Mozambique
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...
Working Paper
Legal empowerment and group-based inequality
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...
Blog
The richer your neighbours, the more you borrow – the case of South Africa
by
Shakeba Foster
April 2023
Research on how income inequality affects borrowing behaviour reignited after the 2008 global recession. One prevailing theory is that rising income...
Working Paper
Democracy clusters and patterns of inequality
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...
Working Paper
Evaluating the impact of the 2023–2024 personal income tax reform in Rwanda
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...
Book Chapter
Poverty, inequality, and growth
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...
Book Chapter
Inequality and growth
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...
Working Paper
Distributional impacts of agricultural policies in Zambia
This paper examines the distributional impacts of agricultural policies versus those of cash transfers using a tax–benefit microsimulation model for Zambia for the policy year 2020. The analysis also considers the behavioural impacts of input...
Blog
Sunshine, elephants, and boomerangs: Is a dramatic rise in global income inequality looming?
by
Ravi Kanbur, Eduardo Ortiz-Juarez,
Andy Sumner
March 2022
Global Inequality 101: Global inequality is the distribution of income across all people on the planet from the poorest to the richest. It can be...
Blog
Report from the WIDER Development Conference on reducing inequality
For several decades, UNU-WIDER has actively worked on pathfinding and groundbreaking research on inequalities. We host one of the most extensive...
Blog
Inequality, fiscal space, and crisis response — A matter of priority, affordability, or both?
by
Annalena Oppel
October 2022
In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, governments financed more than 5000 fiscal support policies worldwide in 2020–21. The pandemic response is an...
Working Paper
The evolution of inequality in Mozambique
After decades of war, ending in 1992, Mozambique embarked on a path of sustained economic growth and substantial poverty reduction. However, these positive dynamics started to revert from 2015, with per capita growth rates getting close to zero and...
Working Paper
Natural disasters and economic inequality
Natural disasters cause economic damages and may exacerbate disparities in income distribution among countries across the globe. This paper employs satellite data on real-time active fire locations to evaluate the short-term impact of forest fires on...
Blog
Reducing inequality — the great challenge of our time
by
Carlos Gradín
October 2022
Early in October 2022, international and Colombian researchers gathered together for three days at the UNIANDES campus, located at the foot of the...
Blog
Want to catch up on UNU-WIDER research? Here are 10 of the most interesting papers published over the last year
In this blog, the managing editor of the WIDERAngle shares his personal view on some of the most important —and potentially overlooked— work recently...
Journal Article
Changing male perceptions of gender equality
In this study, we use a randomized control trial to examine whether asking Vietnamese men to reflect on gender equality can reduce their gender bias. We randomly selected two groups of married men in four rural provinces and asked the first group to...
Blog
Is a strong middle class the secret to high levels of human development?
by
David Castells-Quintana, Carlos Gradín, Vicente Royuela
April 2023
Many countries today experience increasing or persistent income inequality, a major concern for citizens and politicians alike. This concern is...
Blog
Four global problems that will be aggravated by the UK’s recent cuts to international aid
UK economic forecasts have improved markedly since the September 2022 mini-budget. The economic recession may now be more shallow and public borrowing...
Working Paper
Tax–benefit responses in Uruguay during the COVID-19 pandemic
We analyse the social protection policy response to COVID-19 and its impact on household incomes in Uruguay during 2020 and 2021, based on static microsimulation methods. From the onset of the crisis, the Uruguayan government implemented adjustments...
Working Paper
International migration and income inequality
In this paper we explore the links between international migration and income inequality. After presenting a simple model which considers the role of income distribution in individual decisions to migrate, we estimate a set of models on the...
Blog
Direct support to small scale farmers reduces poverty: What Zambia is doing right
Over half of Zambia’s population lived below the national poverty line in 2015. In rural areas, where 89% of households are engaged in agriculture...
Working Paper
Absolute or relative: perceptions of inequality among young adults in Mozambique
Different concepts of inequality lead to different positions in discussions about whether economic growth leads to increasing inequality. This study investigates how over 1,100 young adults in Mozambique perceive inequality and whether their...