An important Islamic imperative is prevention of concentration of wealth among a few so that wealth circulates widely to enhance shared prosperity. In contemporary economic discourse inequality and concentration of wealth have emerged as among key causes of instability and crisis. Unfortunately,...

This paper compares changes in relative and absolute wealth concentrations to establish if both processes have followed similar trajectories. The findings indicate that while the level of relative wealth concentration has increased recently, it is not extraordinarily high in an historical...

Extreme inequality in Brazil is self-evident. The historian José Murilo de Carvalho emblematically chose to end his book on the history of citizenship in Brazil with the severe diagnosis that 'inequality is the slavery of today, the new cancer that hinders the constitution of a democratic...

Wealth concentration in the U.S. has increased over the past 25 years across multiple methodologies for measuring wealth. But the reasons for the increase—and the timing of the increase—are quite different. In this note, we show that most available estimates are fairly consistent in level...