According to the Kuznets hypothesis, inequality first tends to increase and then decrease as a country develops. Whether borne out empirically, this inverted-U Kuznets curve, as a stylized 'fact', has shaped the discourse on economic development and income inequality for decades. In this paper...

Seven decades ago, Simon Kuznets put forward the hypothesis that as economies developed, national inequality would first increase and then decrease-an inverted U-shape. He provided preliminary evidence for the hypothesis on the basis of the limited data available at the time, and theorized the...

The path of income inequality in post-reform China has been widely interpreted as “China’s Kuznets curve.” We show that the Kuznets growth model of structural transformation in a dual economy, alongside population urbanization, has little explanatory power for our new series of inequality...