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Journal Article
Cross-sectional versus panel income approachesPart of Journal Special Issue Inequality
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Working Paper
Differences in inequality measurementOver 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...
Working Paper
Financial reforms and income inequality: evidence from developing countriesThe current context of the COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the most vulnerable socio-economic groups to greater financial risk and thus could lead to exacerbating income inequality. The crisis creates an opportunity to demand further structural and...
Working Paper
Taxing top incomes in the emerging worldRising levels of income inequality and tight government budgets have spurred discussions in many developing nations about how to appropriately tax high-income earners. In this paper, we study taxpayer responses to an increase in the top marginal tax...
Journal Article
Revisiting the trends in global inequalityThe study analyses trends in global income distribution since 1950 using a new companion WIID dataset with standardized country income percentiles. It investigate the robustness of these trends with respect to key data choices, as well as the degree...
Working Paper
Income inequality in South AfricaWe use individual-level tax administrative data to estimate personal income inequality among the tax-compliant population in South Africa over the period 2011–21. Our results indicate that inequality of this population rose slightly over the period...
Working Paper
Construction productivity and global inequalityTwo well established stylized facts of economic development are a strong correlation between investment and income, and large differences in investment rates across countries. Construction is the largest component of investment. This paper examines...
Journal Article
Distributional effects of structural reforms in developing countriesThis study examines the redistributive effects of financial liberalization, including domestic and external finance reforms, implemented in 64 emerging and low-income countries over the past four decades. To identify these effects, we employ a...
Journal Article
The effects of taxation on income inequality in sub-Saharan AfricaARTICLE IS ON EARLY VIEW | This study investigates the effects of taxation on income inequality in an unbalanced panel of 45 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa over the period 1980–2018. We use two-stage least squares and the instrumental variables...
Technical Note
Full-year adjustment for modelling COVID-19 policies in SOUTHMOD tax-benefit microsimulation modelsThis 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...
Working Paper
Democracy clusters and patterns of inequalityThis 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
Measuring labour earnings inequality in post-apartheid South AfricaThis 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...
Blog
Why is inequality in South Africa higher than in Germany?: Explaining income distributions with ‘decompositions’
The understanding of inequality requires the analysis of changes in income distributions across countries and over time as well as the identification...
Working Paper
The developer’s dilemmaThis paper discusses the ‘developer’s dilemma’—a tension emerging from the fact that developing countries are simultaneously seeking structural transformation and broad-based growth to raise incomes of the poor. Simon Kuznets originally hypothesized...
Working Paper
The effects of taxation on income inequality in sub-Saharan AfricaThis paper investigates the effects of taxation on income inequality in an unbalanced panel of 45 countries in sub-Saharan Africa over the period 1980–2018. We use instrumental-variable two-stage least squares and instrumental-variable quantile...
Working Paper
Elite incomes around the worldThis paper analyses elite incomes around the world, and how international comparisons of elite incomes vary depending on the exchange rate and income concept used. It is well known that between-country income inequality is higher using market...
Journal Article
Income inequality in authoritarian regimesIn recent decades, there has been an institutional shift in the literature on authoritarian regimes, with scholars investigating the role of political institutions, such as elections and political parties, in shaping regime stability and economic...
Working Paper
Income inequality and household debtHow does income inequality impact the propensity for and levels of formal and informal household debt? This paper assesses this question using the two most recent waves of the South African Living Conditions Survey. A range of linear models as well...
Working Paper
International migration and income inequalityIn 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...
Working Paper
Trust in institutions and the profile of inequalityThis paper investigates the importance of accounting for the profile of inequality in the analysis of institutional trust. Drawing on individual data from 82 countries around the world over the 1981–2021 period, it sheds light on the potential...
Working Paper
Inequality and productive structureThis paper investigates the evolution of the productive structure around the world and the role it plays in the difference in inequality levels, using panel data for the period from 1995 to 2018. We approximate a country’s productive structure...
Blog
From the editor's desk: Focus on data
This month, a partnership between UNU-WIDER and the Groningen Growth and Development Center (GGDC) brings a new database on economic transformation...
Blog
Detecting global income inequality trends: And why it matters
More accurate estimates of inequality trends allow us to measure progress towards achieving reductions in inequality within and between countries...
Technical Note
WIID Companion (March 2021): data selectionThis 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...
Technical Note
WIID Companion (March 2021): integrated and standardized seriesThis 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...
Technical Note
WIID Companion (March 2021): gobal income distributionThis 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...
Working Paper
Trends in global inequality using a new integrated datasetThis 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...
Working Paper
Premature deindustrialization and income inequality in middle-income countriesThis 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...
Technical Note
WIID Companion (May 2021): data selectionThis 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...
Technical Note
WIID companion (May 2021): integrated and standardized seriesThis 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...
Technical Note
WIID Companion (May 2021): global income distributionThis 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...
Working Paper
Re-examining the Brazilian South–Northeast labour income gapThe 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...
Research Brief
Wage inequality in post-apartheid South AfricaMuch 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...
Working Paper
What works to mitigate and reduce relative (and absolute) inequality?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...
Working Paper
Trends in inequality within countries using a novel datasetWe 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...
Book Chapter
Social mobility in developing countriesPart of Book Social Mobility in Developing Countries
Book
The Developer’s DilemmaThe 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...
Journal Article
Wage growth and inquality in urban ChinaPart of Journal Special Issue Income inequalities and redistribution in China
Journal Article
Income and consumption inequality in ChinaPart of Journal Special Issue Income inequalities and redistribution in China
Journal Article
The long-term evolution of national income inequality and rural poverty in ChinaPart of Journal Special Issue Income inequalities and redistribution in China
Journal Article
Top incomes in ChinaPart of Journal Special Issue Income inequalities and redistribution in China
Book Chapter
Comparing global inequality of income and wealthPart of Book Inequality in the Developing World
Working Paper
Fiscal redistribution in BrazilThis paper assesses causes and consequences of fiscal redistribution in Brazil. The framework proposed allows evaluating in an integrated manner the impacts of government-sponsored actions in inequality and mean income changes on social welfare...
Working Paper
Income under-reporting and tax evasionPersonal income tax is attracting more attention from the Vietnamese government, which has been looking for a way to reinforce its budget revenue. Although this tax plays an increasing role, representing 7.3 per cent of the revenue expected in 2018...
Working Paper
Redefining tax progressivity in developing countriesRecent evidence from developing countries shows that the bottom of the income distribution pays more taxes relative to their income than the top 1%, highlighting a lack of tax progressivity in these societies. Current measures of tax progressivity...
Working Paper
The wage-setting power of firmsUsing 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...
Blog
Inequality: Driving forces and policy solutionsThe 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...
Working Paper
Income and consumption inequality in ChinaWe analyse income and expenditure distribution in China in a comparative perspective with India. These countries represent extreme cases in the relationship of inequality to both wellbeing indicators. Income is more highly concentrated than...
Blog
How a data revolution in South Africa can help address gender inequalityIn 2016, we joined a project in South Africa working to make tax data available for research purposes. Tax authorities collect an enormous amount of...
Working Paper
Top incomes in ChinaWith 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...
Working Paper
Taking stock of South African income inequalityWe 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...
Working Paper
What are the main drivers of Brazilian income distribution changes in the new millennium?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...
Blog
Why are workers getting a smaller share of the cake in Mexico?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...
Working Paper
Gender and the South African labour marketThis 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...
Working Paper
The distributional impact of structural transformation in rural IndiaThe 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...
Policy Brief
Inequality dynamics in ChinaIn the late 1970s, China embarked on a major programme of economic transition and reform. Since then, China’s economy has been transformed from a socialist planned economy to a predominately market economy characterized by a combination of state...
Policy Brief
Inequality in BrazilAfter 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...
Policy Brief
Reducing inequalities in South AfricaSouth 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...
Working Paper
How do human rights violations affect poverty and income distribution?The goal of this paper is to examine the impact of human rights on income distribution and poverty by exploring how both aid and trade can influence poverty and income distribution through human rights. The analysis employs data for 125 countries and...
Journal Article
Skills, personality traits, and gender wage gapsWe use a recent first-hand linked employer–employee survey covering the formal sector of Bangladesh to explain gender wage gaps by the inclusion of measures of cognitive attainment and personality traits. Our results show that cognitive skills have...
Working Paper
The evolution and determination of earnings inequality in post-apartheid South AfricaIn this paper we identify some of the drivers of changes in the distribution of earnings and earnings inequality in the South African labour market between 2000 and 2014. Although the overall level of earnings inequality between 2000 and 2011 was...
Working Paper
Skills, personality traits, and gender wage gapsWe use a recent first-hand linked employer-employee survey covering the formal sector of Bangladesh to explain gender wage gaps by the inclusion of measures of cognitive attainment and personality traits. Our results show that cognitive skills have...
Working Paper
The long-term evolution of income inequality and poverty in ChinaBy using the five waves of the China Household Income Project surveys conducted during 1988–2013, this paper investigates long-term changes in income inequality and poverty in China. Income inequality rose before 2007 and then fell by a small amount...
Working Paper
The distributional impact of tax and benefit systems in six African countriesThis paper assesses the effects of public policies on income taxes and benefits in six African countries. The comparative analysis focuses on the distribution and composition of incomes and assesses the effect of these policies on inequality and...
Working Paper
Comparing global inequality of income and wealthThis 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
Wage growth and inequality in urban ChinaWe investigate the evolution of wage levels, wage inequality, and wage determinants among urban residents in China using China Household Income Project data from 1988, 1995, 2002, 2007, and 2013. Average wage grew impressively between each pair of...
Working Paper
Inequality in ChinaIn 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...
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