This note is motivated by recent arguments made by Martin Feldstein in which the relevance of inequality is dismissed (if everybody's income goes up, who cares if inequality is up too?), and the argument is made that only poverty alleviation should matter. This note shows that we all do care...

When income is redistributed at national level, the minimum requirement is that the transfers should be progressive, that is flow from richer to poorer individuals. The same rule should hold at the global level: it is not sufficient that transfers be from a richer to a poorer country. But...

The reformulation of the median voter hypothesis and its testing proposed in Milanovic (2000) has been criticized from four different perspectives. The critiques are discussed and assessed.

Inequality in world income is very high, according to household surveys, more because of differences between mean country incomes than because of inequality within countries. World inequality increased between 1988 and 1993, driven by slower growth in rural per capita incomes in populous Asian...

Suppose that all people in the world are allocated only two characteristics: country where they live and social class within that country. Assume further that there is no migration. We show that 90 percent of variability in people's global income position (percentile in world income...

The paper discusses recent world income inequality calculations by Sala-i-Martin. It shows that the two main problems with which the author had to grapple (too few data to derive countries' income distributions, and sparseness of such data in time) are not solved in a satisfactory fashion. They,...

Some economists have argued that the process of disintegration of world economy between the two World Wars has led to increased income divergence between the countries. This is in keeping with the view that economic integration leads to income convergence, and consequently that income divergence...

The paper uses the data from Francois Quesnay's writings to derive a social table for pre-revolutionary France, estimate country's mean income and income distribution. These Quesnay-based estimates are compared with more recent estimates of 18th century French incomes and inequality

Was the Euro-Mediterranean region at the time of the Roman empire and its Western successor states, more unequal than the European Union is today? We use some scant evidence on personal income distribution within the Empire and differences in average regional incomes to conclude that the Empire...