This paper examines whether income inequality is affected by the structural progressivity of national income tax systems. Using detailed personal income tax schedules for a large panel of countries, we develop and estimate comprehensive, time-varying measures of structural progressivity of...

This paper describes the correlations between inequality and the growth rates in cross-country data. Using non-parametric methods, we show that the growth rate is an inverted U-shaped function of net changes in inequality: Changes in inequality (in any direction) are associated with reduced...

Relative deprivation (RD), also known as relative poverty, an idea implicitly put forward by Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations and formally conceptualized by Runciman (1966), refers to the discontent people feel when they compare their positions to others and realize that others in the group...

Income inequality and relative poverty in the United States are among the highest in the OECD and have substantially increased over the past decades. These developments have been associated with a number of other worrying statistics, including low intergenerational social mobility and weak real...

One question in the most recent World Values Survey asked whether it is an essential characteristic of democratic governments to tax the rich and subsidize the poor. The present study reports the findings of the survey conducted in South Korea. The overall response and relative ranking are...

We argue that ways of thinking about poverty changed dramatically due to the Great Transformation in Europe which created a market society. These ways spread to the rest of world due to the colonization and global conquest of Europe. The market society requires a labor market which de-humanizes...

The purpose of this paper will be to study the evolution of inequality and poverty in Uruguay between 1989 and 1997. We found that from 1991 there is an increase wage inequality in Uruguay and poverty changed little, decreased until 1993 and then increased. Near a half of poor people in Uruguay...

While it is improbable that households with different incomes are equally likely to participate in sample surveys, the lack of data for nonrespondents has hindered efforts to correct for the bias in measures of poverty and inequality. Mistiaen and Ravallion demonstrate how the latent income...

This paper studies how wealth and health inequalities have interacted with the Covid-19 epidemic in a way that has reinforced inequalities in income, savings, epidemic risk and even individual preventive behaviors. We present in more detail two papers and their theoretical and empirical results....

This paper provides a brief survey of the literature on the effects of the 1990s infrastructure reforms in Latin America on income distribution. It identifies major holes in the coverage of policy issues by the academic literature, including a much needed distinction between access and...