This paper is a review of the post-war literature on income distribution and development. It argues that the literature has cycled from one consensus to another, responding to emerging policy issues and new analysis. On the basis of the review, the paper identifies five areas that will command the attention of analysts in the coming two decades: ((i) country case studies rather than cross-count...

Unemployment is widely regarded as the foremost economic problem currently facing the Australian economy. Among its many evils, high unemployment – especially long-term unemployment – has become a major source of poverty. The unemployed have now replaced the aged as the predominant group in poverty in Australia (King 1997). It also contributes to the rising levels of anxiety about the increasin...

Any summary measure of the degree of inequality in the size distribution of income is sensitive to the choice of both the demographic unit of analysis and ,the income concept. Thus, intertempora1 variation in a summary statistic will be affected not only by economic factors, but also by changes in either unit composition or sources of income. Recently, the post-World War II stability of the agg...

Inequality has become perhaps the foremost preoccupation of modern empirical economics. Yet the conventional theoretical explanations of changing inequality rest on premises long ago demolished on logical grounds. This paper summarizes a Keynesian theory of income distribution. The theory integrates macroeconomic and distributive phenomena and so accounts for the empirical relationship between ...

Background A much-publicized issue in California has been the widening gap in income received by low-income versus high-income households during the past several decades. This report uses California tax return data compiled between 1975 and 1998 to examine the changes in California's income distribution and their causes. L The distribution of adjusted gross income (AGI) reported on Cali-fornia ...

As Pakistan’s economy entered the fourth year (FY 2006-07) of above 7.0 percent growth, its poverty headcount had fallen from one-third to less than one-fourth of the population. The confluence of growth accelerating government policies, nature’s blessings and annual growth of 21% in pro-poor expenditures during the period contributed to approximately 13 million people moving out of poverty. In...