Many advanced economies have recently embarked on fiscal austerity. As this has come at a time of high and rising income disparities, policy-makers have fretted about the inequality effects of fiscal consolidations. We shed new light on this issue by empirically investigating the (composition)...

The aim of this paper is to provide comprehensive empirical evidence on the relationship between international remittances and income inequality. In simple cross-country regressions we find a non-monotonic link between these two variables when using ordinary least squares, instrumental...

Thailand’s economic development has been quite successful in terms of achieving high growth rate and reasonable per capita income. The country’s economic performance in terms of the transformation of production and exports are tending toward the normal pattern of increasing share of...

We examine economic growth, inequality and education when the wellspring of growth is the formation of human capital through a combination of the quality of child-rearing and formal schooling. The existence of multiple steady states is established, including a poverty trap, wherein children work...

This paper focuses on the role of "institutions" in the fight against poverty and inequality. Our view of institutions encompasses formal rules designed by polity (including those in the legal and economics sphere such as rules of property rights, contracts and liabilities) as well as informal...

One of the main obstacles for successful economic development is the formation of institutional traps, inefficient yet stable norms of behaviour. Domination of barter exchange, arrears, corruption and black market activities are examples of institutional traps that have hampered reforms in...

This working paper: (i) provides an overview of global, regional and national income inequalities based on the latest distribution data from the World Bank, UNU-WIDER and Eurostat; (ii) discusses the negative implications of rising income inequality for development; (iii) calls for placing...

Does openness in trade and the free flow of capital promote growth for the poor? In this Working Paper, Nancy Birdsall discusses the inherent asymmetries in globalization, and the implications those inequalities have for poverty reduction. She suggests that global trading rules work less well...

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...