This paper is a review of the post-war literature on income distribution and development. It argues that the literature has cycled from one consensus to another, responding to emerging policy issues and new analysis. On the basis of the review, the paper identifies five areas that will command...

This chapter reviews various interactions between the distribution of income across individuals and factors of production on the one hand, and aggregate savings, investment, and macroeconomic growth on the other. Tractable models necessarily focus on specific causal channels within this complex...

The evolution of income distribution over two centuries is an attractive topic because it allows one to test the inverse U-curve hypothesis using long series instead of cross-section data. In Section 1 the distribution trends in countries where global data are available, is considered, that is...

Income and wealth inequality rose over the first 150 years of US history. They rose in Britain before 1875, especially 1740–1810. The first half of the 20th century equalized pre-fisc incomes both in Britain and in America. From the 1970s to the 1990s inequality rose in both countries,...

We consider the differences in income distribution between market and planned economies in two ways. First, using benchmarks from the OECD area we review evidence from the countries of Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union during the socialist period. Second, we look at the...

This paper reviews some of the central issues that arise in thinking about the motives for, politics of, constraints on and measurement of, redistribution. Amongst the themes are: the potential usefulness of apparently inefficient policy instruments in overcoming the self-selection constraints...

This chapter reviews the existing theories of persistent inequality across generations. The chapter discusses total economic inequality both in wealth and in earnings and focuses on the intergenerational mobility dimension of total inequality. The chapter presents a nonexhaustive, nontechnical...

This chapter reviews definitional issues that arise in assessing the extent of, and change in, poverty in western industrialized countries, including the choice of resource, level of poverty line and appropriate adjustments for the size and type of the income-sharing unit. The chapter also...

This chapter reviews the evidence on cross-national comparisons of annual disposable income inequality in over 20 wealthy nations. We begin by reviewing a number of conceptual and measurement issues which must be addressed by any cross-national comparison of survey-based household income data....