This paper examines the impact of oil price shocks and attempts to explain why the rise in oil prices up to 2008 had little impact on the world economy. It makes three main arguments. First, that oil prices have never been as important as is popularly thought. Second, that the most important...

This chapter investigates recent advances in our understanding of the global distribution of income, and produces the first estimates of global inequality that take into account data on the incomes of the top one percent within countries. We discuss conceptual and methodological issues –...

Natural resource revenues differ from other government revenues both in their time profile, and in their political and legal status: they are volatile and exhaustible, and belong to all citizens of the country in which they are located. This paper discusses the theory of natural resource...

Summary This paper considers the proposal that each country distributes its resource rents directly to citizens as a universal and unconditional cash transfer, or Resource Dividend, and estimates its potential impact on global poverty for the years 2000-06. Using a global dataset on resource...

In this paper, we review the recent literature on global interpersonal income inequality. While all estimates agree that the level is very high, with a Gini of between 0.630 and 0.686 in the 1990s, there is no consensus regarding the direction of change. We discuss methodological issues,...