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Does the Kuznets Curve still matter 70 years on? Yes! Here’s whySeventy years ago, Simon Kuznets was immortalised by his finding that inequality rises first and then falls later—the hypothesis widely known as the...
Ravi Kanbur
Non-Resident Senior Research Fellow
Ravi Kanbur researches and teaches in development economics, public economics, and economic theory at Cornell University. He has served on the senior staff of the World Bank including as Chief Economist for Africa. He has also published in leading economics journals, including Journal of Political Economy, American Economic Review, Review of Economic Studies, Journal of Economic Theory, and Economic Journal.
He served as Co-Chair of the Food System Economics Commission, Chair of the Board of United Nations University–World Institute for Development Economics Research, member of the OECD High Level Expert Group on the Measurement of Economic Performance, President of the Human Development and Capability Association, President of the Society for the Study of Economic Inequality, member of the High Level Advisory Council of the Climate Justice Dialogue, Co-Chair of the Scientific Council of the International Panel on Social Progress, and member of the Core Group of the Commission on Global Poverty.
Professor Kanbur was a member of the UNU-WIDER Board 2009–2019. As a UNU-WIDER Non-Resident Senior Research Fellow, he is involved in the Inequality and structural transformation – Kuznets at 70 project.
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Journal Article
Is the era of declining global income inequality over?This study examines the trajectory of global income inequality since 1981. Commonly used (relative) definitions indicate a decline in global inequality since the late 1980s. Looking ahead, it has been intuited that the influence of China's economic...
Book Chapter
Reflections on Informal Employment, COVID-19, and the FuturePart of Book COVID-19 and the Informal Economy
Working Paper
How should an optimal tax system react to a crisis?The COVID-19 pandemic increased public debt and changed the income distribution in many countries. We use a numerical simulation approach to derive optimal nonlinear marginal tax rates for the pre-crisis and crisis periods. We contribute to the...
Working Paper
Comparing the poverty-reduction efficiency of targeted versus universal benefits amid crisesThis study evaluates which type of benefit—a universal benefit, a proxy mean-tested benefit, or a categorical benefit— better cushions the poverty effects of income shocks in a developing economy. We compare the effectiveness of the three benefit...
Working Paper
Employer power and employment in developing countriesThe issue of employer power is underemphasized in the development literature. The default model is usually one of competitive labour markets. This assumption matters for analysis and policy prescription. There is growing evidence that the competitive...
Journal Article
Promoting education under distortionary taxationA common claim in the policy discourse is that a government wishing to achieve equality of opportunity should use public provision of education for equalisation of opportunities rather than income taxation, which only equalizes incomes. We develop a...
Blog
Sunshine, elephants, and boomerangs: Is a dramatic rise in global income inequality looming?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...
Working Paper
The global inequality boomerangThis paper focuses on the past and potential future evolution of income (or consumption) inequality in the world over the period 1981–2040. Inequality in the world has fallen by most common definitions since the late 1980s, and this is largely due to...
Working Paper
Who demands labour (de)regulation in the developing world?Contrary to the predictions of the insider–outsider model, we show that the large majority of outsiders in developing countries support, rather than oppose, protective labour regulations. This evidence holds across countries in different regions...
Working Paper
In praise of snapshotsThe conventional justification for moving from income distribution to intergenerational mobility analysis is that the movie encompasses the snapshot and is normatively superior as the basis for assessing policy. Such a perspective underpins many an...
Working Paper
Promoting education under distortionary taxationHow 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...
Displaying 16 of 68 results