This paper demonstrates that the property of 'replication invariance', generally considered to be an innocuous requirement for the extension of fixed-population poverty comparisons to variable-population contexts, is incompatible with other plausible variable- and fixed-population axioms. --...

Debates about poverty relief and foreign aid often hinge on claims about how many poor people there are in the world and what constitutes poverty. Good measures of poverty are essential for addressing the world poverty problem. Measures of poverty require a basis for determining who is poor and...

We investigate the heterogeneous and nonlinear intergenerational transmission channels of education and the impact on this of house price appreciation. Using the China Household Finance Survey 2011, we construct household history of property purchases and educational investment over the past 16...

The majority of the world's poor, by income poverty and multi-dimensional poverty, now live in countries officially classified by the World Bank as middle-income countries. Of course nothing happens when a country crosses a (somewhat) arbitrary threshold in per capita income but it does matter...

In this paper we argue that the decline in global inequality over the last decades has spurred a 'sunshine' narrative of falling global inequality that has been rather oversold, in the sense, we argue, it is likely to be temporary. We argue the decline in global inequality will reverse due to...

Various scholars have estimated levels of intergenerational mobility in OECD countries. Fewer estimates are available for developing countries, where mobility arguably matters more due to starker differences in living standards. This paper presents new estimates of mobility for a developing...

We focus on special characteristics of the manufacturing sector, in terms of employment generation and productivity growth, that enable the rapid, resilient economic catch-up of developing countries. We consider the 'developer's dilemma' and the relationship between manufacturing value added or...

This paper provides a broad picture of national, regional and global trends of inequality in length of life over the period 1950-2015. We use data on life tables from World Population Prospects to develop a comprehensive database of a battery of inequality measures for 201 countries at five-year...

The interest in the level of global inequality has surged in recent years. This paper complements existing estimates of global inequality by providing the first estimates of the level of bipolarization of the global income distribution. During 1975-2010, global bipolarization declined...

This paper presents the first global and regional estimates of polarization and bipolarization spanning the period 1960-2020. The study relies on group data to implement a flexible parametric model to obtain the global income distribution and polarization estimates. The study introduces a...