The United States and China are the world's largest economies. Together they are responsible for about one-third of the world's economic output. This paper aims to examine whether the two economic giants are also lands of opportunity where resources are allocated in a way that minimizes...

Studies of the spatial dimensions of inequality in developing countries are mostly restricted to states, provinces, or districts, typically the smallest geographical units for which data are representative in national surveys. We introduce a procedure to calculate inequality between and within...

We use income data from tax registers at the Uganda Revenue Authority from 2011 to 2017 to estimate top income inequality, focusing on the very top-the top 1, 0.1, and 0.01 per cent of the income distribution. The focus on the extreme top is facilitated by access to population data on formal...

Different concepts of inequality lead to different positions in discussions about whether economic growth leads to increasing inequality. This study investigates how over 1,100 young adults in Mozambique perceive inequality and whether their perceptions are based on relative or absolute terms....

Globally, there are several initiatives being undertaken to ensure the availability of information across countries that can be used to analyse the inequality phenomenon in and among countries. The data are easily accessible for use in comparative research on inequality across regions and...

In very poor countries, inequality often means that a small part of the population maintains living standards far above the rest. This is also true for educational inequality in Mozambique: only a small segment of the population has access to higher levels of education (there are 30 times as...

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...

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...

This paper argues that attempts at state-building in Afghanistan have led to institutions that are not robust. The state institutions and organizations continue to be highly dependent on external resources and technical expertise, and lack of critical mass of people able and willing to maintain...

This paper discusses the 'developer's dilemma' - a tension emerging from the fact that developing countries are simultaneously seeking structural transformation and broad-based growth to raise incomes of the poor. Simon Kuznets originally hypothesized that structural transformation may have a...