With all the talk in Europe about “Islam” and “Muslim culture” it is surprising how little hard-core empirical evidence exists on the compatibility of “Muslim culture” with positive patterns of political, social, and ecological development in the world system in the 1980s, 1990s, and...

The article analyses further develops the neo-dependency approach already presented by the same author and looks at recent time series trends in the structure of international capital penetration, international savings, and the dynamics of “unequal transfer” and their effects on social...

Economic institutions determine prospects for growth and development. In this paper a condition on the primitives determines whether an economy supports institutions that implement markets. Agents differ in land holdings, skill, and power. A competitive market assigns land to the skilled, not...

The financial crisis of 2008 and its aftermath offer an opportunity to institute significant reform in economics teaching, starting at the introductory level. Mainstream macroeconomics texts still rely heavily on a classical assumption of a long-run full employment equilibrium, which underrates...

The aim of the article is to assess the impact of taxes on poverty and inequality in Ukraine and provide recommendations on how taxation should be used to address problems of inequality and poverty. The research methodology is based on a combination of linear regression and commitment to equity...

Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century posits the return r on capital to be larger than the economic growth rate g as a main driver of inequalities. This article points out the circumstances under which the reverse inference holds. We show that increasing inequality promotes increasing...

Cross-country evidence on inflation and inequality suggests that they are positively correlated. I explore the hypothesis that this correlation is the outcome of a distributional conflict underlying the determination of fiscal policy.

Governments perpetually align their policies to satisfy shifts in voters' relative demand for economic growth versus social equality. Following such shifts, increases (decreases) in government interventions lower (raise) both inequality and growth. This mechanism generates a positive co-movement...

Academic treatments of distributive justice normally adopt a static approach centred on resource allocation among a set of individual agents. The resulting models, expressed in mathematical language, make no allowance for culture, as they never engage with the society’s way of life or the...

Why does inequality vary across societies? We advance the hypothesis that in a market economy, where earning differentials reflect variations in productive traits among individuals, a significant component of the differences in inequality across societies can be attributed to variation in...