Empirical evidence about income convergence among regions and countries is inconclusive and it is necessary to clarify the economic and institutional conditions for convergence. We investigate movements in the income distribution among regions in an integrated market with high mobility of labor,...

This work calculates coefficients of spatial inequalities of wealth amongst Brazilian municipalities, for each year for the period from 1920 to 2016, states of the federation, from 1939 to 2017, and amongst municipalities from each of the five Brazilians' macro-regions, from 1920 to 2016. The...

The commonly-used satellite images of nighttime lights fail to capture the true brightness of most cities. We show that night lights are a reliable proxy for economic activity at the city level, provided they are first corrected for top-coding. We present a stylized model of urban luminosity and...

Economic development, which refers to the process of progressive transformation of an economy, is a multifaceted term without a universal definition. This article presents the constitutive elements of economic development, such as growth, distribution, and innovation. Economic development has...

This paper suggests an empirical framework for analysing income distribution dynamics and cross-region convergence in the European Union of 27 member states, 1995-2003. The framework lies in the research tradition that allows the state income space to be continuous, puts emphasis on both shape...

We investigate the relevance of beta (β, absolute and conditional) and sigma (σ) convergence in the economies of the Common Monetary Area of Southern Africa and in the provinces of the Republic of South Africa using panel data, allowing an understanding of growth and inequality in the region....

The paper provides historical perspectives on spatial economic inequalities in Brazil making use of a database on Brazilian municipalities from 1872 to 2000. A suit of maps and graphs describe the geographic factors shaping the historical development of the Brazilian economy highlighting the...

Although it is often argued that wealth inequality matters more for economic growth than income inequality, this relationship has rarely been studied empirically, with a few exceptions covering a very restricted country sample or short timeframe. Leveraging hitherto unexploited wealth inequality...

The present paper assesses the interactions between innovation and economic institutions within the context of the inequality-growth nexus. By carrying out fixed effects estimations on a cross-country panel, we find that both institutional quality and innovations improve economic growth at the...

A recently much debated issue is why observed investment and growth rates inpoor countries are lower than traditional theory predicts. Empirical evidencesuggests that social and political instability is a major reason for thedivergence between poor and rich countries. However, there is still the...