Pro-development economic growth and international income mobility: Evidence worldwide

This paper suggests a new methodology which allows to show whether worldwide growth has been favourable to developing economies, and a new measure to assess international income mobility across countries. The empirical illustration considers a panel of 123 countries observed over the years 1989-2008. The results point out that worldwide income growth was not pro-development, they show rather an impoverishment of the low-income countries over the last two decades. The results also reveal that income mobility induced by countries reranking within the income distribution decreased between the 1990s and the 2000s, and the bulk of positional mobility took place in the middle-income economies.