The phenomenon of globalization, which refers to the rising trade and Ž nancial integration of the world economy, has gathered steam in recent decades. The growth rate of world trade has been greater than that of world output in almost all years since 1960, and the cumulative increase in the volume of world trade is almost three times larger than that of world output over this period. A more dr...

The variance in the logarithms of per capita GDP in purchasing-power-parity prices increased in the world from 1960 to 1968 and decreased since the mid 1970s. In the later period the convergence in intercountry incomes more than offset any increase in within country inequality. Approximately two-thirds of this measure of world inequality is intercountry, three-tenths interhousehold within count...

The variance in the logarithms of per capita GDP in purchasing-power-parity prices increased in the world from 1960 to 1968 and decreased since the mid 1970s. In the later period the convergence in intercountry incomes more than offset any increase in within country inequality. Approximately two-thirds of this measure of world inequality is intercountry, three-tenths interhousehold within count...

Paraguay is a country located in the center of South America, sharing borders with Brazil to the east and northeast, Argentina to the west and southwest, and Bolivia to the northwest. It is divided in two regions, Occidental (western) and Oriental (eastern), separated by the river Paraguay. The regions are in turn subdivided in 17 departments plus the capital district (Fig. 1). The country has ...

Recent research has found that richer countries have higher well-being than poorer countries and that the relationship is similar in magnitude to that seen between rich and poor members within countries. However, limited data have constrained previous researchers’ ability to detect whether economic growth within countries leads to greater well-being. Thus the question of whether raising the inc...

Public debt is one of the important economic variables that quantitatively describes a nation’s economy. Because bankruptcy is a risk faced even by institutions as large as governments (e.g., Iceland), national debt should be strictly controlled with respect to national wealth. Also, the problem of eliminating extreme poverty in the world is closely connected to the study of extremely poor debt...

This paper proposes a social welfare framework in which to analyze the relationships between growth, trends in inequality, mobility, and social welfare. An application of the framework to worldwide and regional data on per capita GDP suggests a lack of convergence at the world level, opposite trends in convergence in various regions of the world, and a fairly low level of mobility or re-ranking...