This technical note presents a modelling approach used in Lastunen et al. (2021) where tax and benefit policies are scaled to reflect their actual duration during a single calendar year. It can be applied to tax-benefit microsimulation models...
This month, a partnership between UNU-WIDER and the Groningen Growth and Development Center (GGDC) brings a new database on economic transformation...
More accurate estimates of inequality trends allow us to measure progress towards achieving reductions in inequality within and between countries...
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 presents preliminary evidence of the annual global income distribution since 1950 using a new integrated dataset that aggregates standardized country income distributions at the percentile level estimated from various sources in the World...
This paper examines the income inequality implications of a ‘premature deindustrialization’ trend in middle-income countries. To identify the premature deindustrialization phase, we arrive at five conditions based on the trends in employment and...
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...
The purpose of this article is to provide new evidence about the sources of regional income inequalities in Brazil along the wage distribution, taking into account the regional differentials in purchasing power. We use a unique and recent regional...
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...
Over the past two decades, research on the impacts of a diverse range of public policies and income inequality has seen rapid growth. Despite the large number of publications to date, there remain important lacunae in our understanding of how policy...
The developer’s dilemma is thus: developing countries seek inclusive economic development — i.e., structural transformation — sufficiently broad-based to raise the income of the poor. Inclusive economic growth requires falling income inequality to...
We revisit trends in within-country income inequality using a newly integrated dataset that covers at least 70 per cent of the global population since 1980. We investigate absolute and relative inequality trends across the past four decades...
Part of Book Social Mobility in Developing Countries
Using administrative tax records from South Africa for the period 2011–14, I find that firm wage premia explain 25 per cent of the total wage variance, 60 per cent of the gender wage gap, and 40 per cent of the gap between workers in the middle and...
After three decades of persistently high inequality, Brazil has been experiencing a downward trend since 2001, accompanied by a rise in household incomes. These trends lasted until 2014 when a major reversal took place on both fronts. Since the 1970s...
South Africa has the highest rate of measured inequality in the world. Often thought to be a legacy of the apartheid system, inequality in South Africa has stubbornly persisted. South Africa’s position as highest inequality country in the world has...
The many faces of inequality Measuring inequality isn’t as simple as it may seem. We know that since the 1970s global inequality has been falling in...
With the data on the top incomes collected from different sources, we combine the samples of the top incomes with a household survey to investigate changes in the income distribution with and without the top incomes. The Gini coefficient of income...
We synthesize the findings from several recent papers on South Africa’s very high income inequality. These papers use new datasets—including income tax data—and new empirical methods to investigate the drivers of household income and individual...
After three decades of persistently high income inequality, from 2001 Brazil experienced a downward inequality trend followed by rising household income growth. Both movements lasted until 2015. This work synthesizes the results of six papers...
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 paper has three primary objectives. First, it provides a broad overview of the available South African data used to examine gender in the labour market, with specific reference to the South African Revenue Services (SARS) tax data which has...
The North Indian village of Palanpur has been the subject of close study over a period of six decades from 1957/8 to 2015. Himanshu et al. (2018) have documented the evolution of the village economy over this period in an exhaustive study entitled...
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