Regional differences in prices levels are substantial in many countries, but little is known about how important they are for income inequality and relative poverty. To bridge this gap, we provide new evidence on the basis of the best available data and a novel two-step approach. First, we...

Economic inequality across Asia has been growing, but dimensions of this inequality and their development are unclear. This paper evaluates income inequality using household surveys from China, India, Japan, Korea, Russia and Taiwan. These countries may be viewed as jointly representative of...

This study presents new empirical results, using microdata from the LIS database, on development patterns in economic inequality for a set of countries that are less covered in the empirical literature, mostly due to the lack of appropriate data. After discussing the main challenges when...

Following Russia's February invasion of Ukraine and the imposition of sanctions by countries worldwide, Russian population faces a crisis with deep but differentiated consequences across socioeconomic groups. We examine the evolution of earnings and societal earnings gaps throughout Vladimir...

Many of the world's LDCs are plagued by recurring conflict. Conflict impedes sustainable development through various channels, creating conditions conducive to further conflict. Conflict has redistributive impacts, particularly when it erupts in resource-rich countries. Between 2002 and 2011,...

This paper measures high medical expenses in ten developed countries, both overall and by income and age, providing some of the best evidence to date on the extent of high medical spending across and within countries. Using comparable household-level data on out-of pocket (OOP) medical...

How adequately did governments protect their citizens over the Great Recession? The recent recession, the worst since the Great Depression, provides an opportune moment to investigate the adequacy and fairness of countries' responses to an economic crisis. Using household-level LIS data from...

Consumption taxes are often considered as the most anti-redistributive component of the tax system. Yet, very few estimates, and fewer international comparisons of the redistributive impact of consumption taxes exist in the literature, due to scarce data on household expenditures. We use...

This paper provides recent evidence on the contribution of the spatial dimension to inequality and more specifically accounts for the impact of the changes in the territorial distribution of the population on the recent dynamics of income inequality. We use LIS harmonized microdata for a...

Current studies addressing the rise in inequality confine themselves to country-level developments. This paper delineates trends in earnings inequality and employment at the sectoral level for eight LIS countries between 1985-2005. Earnings inequality mainly manifests itself within rather than...