Asia is the most populous continent on earth. Changes in inequality or poverty in this region alter the corresponding global picture. Due to its remarkable economic growth and catch up in living standards, Asia has been an equalizing force in constituting international inequality. However, within-country inequalities in Asia are fast rising, which have contributed to the slow down in poverty re...

Brazil recently overtook the UK as the sixth largest economy, a measure of the strong economic growth experienced since 2003. Growth has been intensely propoor, and both poverty and inequality have declined significantly in the last decade. What explains the unexpected success shown by Brazil in combining sustained economic growth with a reduction in poverty and inequality? Some researchers sug...

As the United States approaches the twenty-first century... in an information-based, transnational and managerial economy, it is becoming increasingly apparent that if we do not better negotiate race and ethnicity in our society, we will not adequately solve the problems of economic inequality and discrimination. Racial and/or ethnic divisions and competition shape our efforts to understand and...

This paper looks into the relations between economic growth and poverty reduction in Jamaica. A poverty profile is constructed, based on household budget survey data, and per capita growth is decomposed into pure growth effects and changes in inequality effects. I find that growth has contributed to poverty reduction mainly because there has not been any large increases in inequality. However, ...

Principles from the social thought of the Indian philosopher P.R. Sarkar are employed to show that there exists an optimal level of economic inequality that joins the values of economic justice and efficiency. Sarkar favored establishing a living wage as well as a maximum wage that allows for work incentives. It is argued that the primary justification for inequality is to provide incentives fo...

Adam, Antonis, Kammas, Pantelis, and Lapatinas, Athanasios—Income inequality and the tax structure: Evidence from developed and developing countries This paper seeks to examine the effect of income inequality on the structure of tax policies. We first use a simplified theoretical framework which allows us to formalize the testable implications of the relevant literature. Subsequently, our analy...

This article provides a comprehensive picture of economic inequality in northwestern Italy (Piedmont), focusing on the long-term developments occurred during 1300-1800 ca. Regional studies of this kind are rare, and none of them has as long a timescale. The new data proposed illuminate many little-known aspects of wealth distribution and general economic inequality in preindustrial times, and s...

This paper provides a critical review of the recent literature on inequality and growth. After discussing historical and more recent distributional trends as well as empirical evidence on the relationship between inequality and growth, I focus on recent explanations of the inequality-growth puzzle. I consider both the impact of the functional and the personal distribution on long-run growth rat...