This paper is a review of the post-war literature on income distribution and development. It argues that the literature has cycled from one consensus to another, responding to emerging policy issues and new analysis. On the basis of the review, the paper identifies five areas that will command...

The work focuses on the analysis of the bilateral relationship between technological changes and inequality. First, it focus on the impact of technological innovations on inequality and the theory of Skills Biased Technological Changes (SBTC). Given technology can produce inequality; what is the...

We examine the causal effect of natural resource discoveries on income inequality using the synthetic control method on data from 1947 to 2009. We focus on the natural discoveries in Denmark, Netherlands and Norway in the 1960-1970s and use top 1% and top 10% income share as the measure of...

We estimate trends in global earnings dispersion across occupational groups using a new database covering 66 developed and developing countries between 1970 and 2015. Our main finding is that global earnings inequality has declined, primarily during the 2000s, when the global Gini coefficient...

In a polarised and highly unequal country such as South Africa, it is unlikely that a definition of the middle class that is based on an income threshold will adequately capture the political and social meanings of being middle class. We therefore propose a multi-dimensional definition, rooted...

Using comparable fiscal incidence analysis, this paper examines the impact of fiscal policy on inequality and poverty in 25 countries for around 2010. Success in fiscal redistribution is driven primarily by redistributive effort (share of social spending to GDP in each country) and the extent to...

We estimate trends in global earnings dispersion across occupational groups using a new database covering 66 developed and developing countries between 1970 and 2015. Our main finding is that global earnings inequality has declined, primarily during the 2000s, when the global Gini coefficient...

We estimate trends in global earnings dispersion across occupational groups using a new database covering 66 developed and developing countries between 1970 and 2015. Our main finding is that global earnings inequality has declined, primarily during the 2000s, when the global Gini coefficient...

Martin Ravallion ("Why Don't We See Poverty Convergence?" American Economic Review, 102(1): 504-23; 2012) presents evidence against the existence of proportionate convergence in global poverty rates despite convergence in household mean income levels and the link between income growth and poverty...