This study examines empirically the impact of income polarization on economic growth in an unbalanced panel of more than 70 countries during the 1960-2005 period. We calculate various polarization indices using existing micro-level datasets, as well as datasets reconstructed from grouped data on...

The paper empirically investigates, in the context of African countries, the determinants of income distribution and inequality, the effect of inequality on economic growth, and the channels through which inequality affects growth. Data for 35 countries over different periods in the last four...

This paper reviews Finnish economic history during the ‘long’ twentieth century with a special emphasis on policies for equity and growth. We argue that Finland developed from a poor, vulnerable, and conflict-prone country to a modern economy in part through policies geared at both growth...

Why do Scandinavian countries perform better in terms of environmental protection than other European Union countries? In this paper, we explore the hypothesis that societies characterised by low-income inequality (such as the Nordic European countries) generate political-economic equilibria...

This paper analyzes the interaction between intergenerational wealth transmission, human capital investments under uninsurable labor income risk, and economic growth in a small open overlapping-generations economy with heterogeneous agents. It demonstrates how the role of the personal income...

This paper reviews recent research dealing with the relationships between economic growth, income distribution, and poverty. This generally fails to find any systematic pattern of change in income distribution during recent decades. Neither does it find any systematic link from fast growth to...

We construct an overlapping generations model to study the effect of capital controls on human capital investments and the incidence of redistributive politics in a growing economy. We argue that the conventional wisdom linking higher capital controls to lower growth is reproduced only when an...

This paper argues that an increase in the inequality of wealth prompts a stronger quest for status that in turn fosters the accumulation of wealth. It proposes a measure for an individual's want of social status. For a given level of a population's wealth, the corresponding aggregate measure of...