Cooperatives represent an alternative to large-scale corporate farms and plantations as well as to independent unaffiliated small private farms. This paper presents a comparative modeling narrative on cooperative organizational forms’ potential impact on equitable rural development. This...

The present study examines trends in employment status in Egypt in an important era of democratic transition. It examines determinants of different labor force participation by gender. The empirical analysis is based on the World Values Survey of the fifth wave (2005-2008). A comparative...

The paper examines empirically the question of whether more unequal societies spend more on income redistribution than their more egalitarian counterparts. Theoretical arguments on this issue are inconclusive. The political economy literature suggests that redistributive spending is higher in...

Why does the largest US welfare programme select its recipients by their age, rather than by their earnings or wealth? In a dynamic efficient overlapping generation economy with earnings heterogeneity, we analyze a welfare system composed of a within-cohort redistribution scheme and an unfunded...

Despite severe exogenous shocks, the macroeconomic program remained broadly on track, and several social indicators, particularly in the area of basic education, progressed. A variety of measures have been successfully implemented to improve the environment for private sector development, reduce...

What limits the capacity of society to redistribute and provide insurance? What determines the structure of compensation in organizations striving for income equality? This paper addresses these questions by investigating the economic and sociological forces underlying the persistence of the...

A utilitarian social planner who maximizes social welfare assigns the available income to those who are most efficient in converting income into utility. However, when individuals are concerned about their income falling behind the incomes of others, the optimal income distribution under...

In this paper we outline (i) why sigma-convergence may not accompany beta-convergence, (ii) discuss evidence of beta-convergence in the U.S., and (iii) use U.S. county-level data containing over 3,000 cross-sectional observations to demonstrate that sigma-convergence cannot be detected at the...

Adequate infrastructure has long been viewed as an important factor in economic development. Based on regressions covering 76 advanced and emerging market economies, this paper estimates the impact of infrastructure and investment on income distribution. It finds that better infrastructure, both...

This paper assesses how pro-poor and inclusive Asia’s recent growth has been, and what factors have been driving these outcomes. It finds that while poverty has fallen across the region over the last two decades, inequality has increased, dampening the impact of growth on poverty reduction. As...