As the crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic evolves, developing nations are struggling to deliver economic assistance and public services to their...
Technological catch-up is bringing new asynchronies to development pathways. What does this mean for employment, globalization, and inequality? A...
Policy makers seeking inclusive growth frequently face the developer’s dilemma between prioritizing structural transformation, which is potentially...
To celebrate its 35th birthday, UNU-WIDER has looked back at some of its greatest achievements. As the year closes, Armida Alisjahbana, Kunal Sen...
There is a growing need to understand income inequality trends and how they interplay with other social, economic, and political outcomes, both at the...
UNU-WIDER released the world’s first estimates of the global wealth distribution in 2007 – one result of a 2004–05 project, ‘Personal Assets from a...
Even though poverty and inequality have been of overriding concern in South Africa’s development policies and programmes since its democratization in 1994, measures of poverty, inequality, and related phenomena in the country do not show a clear...
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...
How does the public provision of education and the deployment of distortionary tax and subsidy instruments differ when the government’s objective is conventional welfarist compared to when the objective is the non-welfarist one of equality of...
This paper assesses the effects on poverty and inequality of the alternative targeting approaches that Zambia’s Social Cash Transfer programme could take as its expansion continues during the period of the country’s Seventh National Development Plan...
Longitudinal surveys can give insight into economic mobility, which allows us to understand how markers of (dis)advantage are consequential in determining material conditions in the present, and how these markers structure economic opportunity over...
This paper applies a novel inequality estimation method to household consumption expenditure in Mumbai, India. Since the richest households may be missing in survey data, this re-estimated inequality figure takes them into account by combining survey...
Income inequality is the result of complex processes with multiple interacting driving forces but understanding those drivers in emerging economies is...
As with many other developed and emerging economies, in recent decades Mexico has experienced a long-term decline in the labour income share. In other...
This study investigates the effect of real exchange rate volatility on the distribution of income between labour and capital in South Africa. Both symmetric and asymmetric effects are considered. Using quarterly data for 1985:1–2018:3 and local...
This paper contributes to the literature by reviewing levels, trends, and structure of inequality since the early 1990s in India. It draws extensively on the existing literature, supplemented with analyses of multiple data sources, to paint a picture...
I found myself in the third-floor conference rooms of a Pretoria hotel for a meeting with economists, researchers, and policymakers involved in the SA...
South Africa exhibits extreme levels of income inequality and is ranked as one of the most unequal countries in the world. In order to measure these severe levels of inequality, it matters how we account for the different parts of the income...
Macroeconomic strategies and policies have differed significantly among Asian countries over the last fifty years, and yet some common issues recur despite their immense diversity in inherited historical initial conditions, differences in political...
This paper investigates the impact of inequality on individual civic engagement at the community level, whether this impact persists over time, and what mechanisms may shape the relationship between inequality and civic engagement. The results show...
South Africa is often cited as the most unequal economy in the world. Its experience of having to overcome both colonialism and apartheid makes it unique from the vantage of studies on socioeconomic class, economic mobility, and poverty — with...
This paper develops a normative approach to the measurement of ex-ante inequality of opportunity in a multidimensional setting—that is, when the individual outcome is represented by a multidimensional variable. We characterize three classes of social...
The understanding of inequality requires the analysis of changes in income distributions across countries and over time as well as the identification...
2020 promised to be a big year for UNU-WIDER, with the celebration of our 35th anniversary, the 45th birthday of UNU, and 75 years of the UN. But as...
Part of Journal Special Issue Inequalities in the least developed countries
Longitudinal surveys allow us to understand how markers of (dis)advantage determine present material welfare and economic upward or downward mobility over time. In this paper, we use five waves of panel data to empirically assess the extent and...
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