The economism paradigm consists of five key elements: capitalist market economy; poverty reduction rather than the pursuit of equality; the “economic fertilizer” role of government; a pro-growth political regime and domestic economic stability. Economism is a paradigm of “more or less”, in which individuals with different income can change positions given equality in economic opportunities. Eco...

This paper provides an introduction to the special issue of the Review of Economic Dynamics on “Cross Sectional Facts for Macroeconomists”. The issue documents, for nine countries, the level and the evolution, over time and over the life cycle, of several dimensions of economic inequality, including wages, labor earnings, income, consumption, and wealth. After describing the motivation and the ...

BACKGROUND Policy interventions have been taken to protect households from facing unpredictable economic changes that may cause catastrophe in China. This study aims to estimate the change of overall proportion of households incurring catastrophic health care expenditure (CHE) and its income-related inequality in the rural areas of Shaanxi Province from 2008 to 2013. METHODS The data were dra...

Theoretical models and empirical studies exploring the relationship between income inequality and growth reach a disappointing inconclusive answer. We postulate in this paper that one reason for this inconclusive result is that income inequality consist at least in two different sorts of inequality, inequality of opportunity and effort. These two types of inequality would affect growth through ...

Income Satisfaction Inequality and its Causes In this paper, the concept of Income Satisfaction Inequality is operationalized on the basis of individual responses to an Income Satisfaction question posed in the German SocioEconomic Panel (GSOEP). Income satisfaction is the subjective analogue of the objective income concept and includes objective income inequality as a special case. The paper i...

BACKGROUND Early detection of cancer is an effective and efficient cancer management strategy. In South Korea, the National Health Insurance administers the National Cancer Screening Program to its beneficiaries. We examined the impact of the National Cancer Screening Program on socioeconomic disparities in cancer stage at diagnosis. METHODS Cancer patients registered in the Korean Central Ca...

Inequality indices (i) evaluate the divergence between the income distribution and the hypothetical situation where all individuals have the mean income and (ii) are unambiguously reduced by a Pigou-Dalton progressive transfer. This paper proposes a new approach to evaluate the divergence between any two income distributions, where the second one can be a reference distribution for the first. I...

Rapid growth and structural change have reduced poverty in East Asian economies. Income inequality has been low in Korea and Taiwan, but has risen in recent years with economic liberalization. In the Southeast Asian economies of Th ailand, Malaysia and Indonesia, poverty has declined, while income inequality trends have varied, rising most clearly in Th ailand. With its strengthened (private) p...