A number of authors have documented an increase in earnings or income inequality in New Zealand during the late 1980s and early 1990s, a period of major economic reform, however no study has evaluated changes in inequality during the post-reform era. This paper applies a recently-developed...

This paper introduces two composite indices of globalisation. The first is based on the Kearney/Foreign Policy magazine and the second is obtained from principal component analysis. They indicate the level of globalisation and show how globalisation has developed over time for different...

In this paper, the concept of Income Satisfaction Inequality is operationalized on the basis of individual responses to an Income Satisfaction question posed in the German Socio- Economic Panel (GSOEP). Income satisfaction is the subjective analogue of the objective income concept and includes...

Recent studies of the association between inequality, social capital and mortality at the state level rely on idiosyncratic measures of state social capital. We demonstrate that these statistical associations are sensitive to the methods used to calculate state social capital.

In this paper, we examine the link between the concepts of income convergence and pro-poor growth in a panel of countries. We show that if growth is pro-poor, then the convergence which occurs is a ‘pro-poor convergence’, because it necessarily implies a fall in income inequality. The...

This paper assesses the long-run effect of growth volatility on income inequality using a comprehensive panel of annual U.S. state-level data during the 1945 to 2004 period. Using the pooled mean group (PMG) estimator, we find evidence supporting the hypothesis that larger growth volatility...

This article surveys the major rural policy changes that have occurred in China over the past two decades and analyses the results from national surveys to obtain a picture of the changes in rural labour allocation, income and poverty levels, and income inequality over the period 1991-2011. We...

We propose a simple quality-ladder model with heterogeneous agents differing in their skills and wealth endowment to explain the persistence of barriers to entry in new democracies. In the model agents vote for a rate of redistribution and for the level of barriers to entry, which protect the...

We propose a structural model to estimate inequality of opportunity (IOp) among workers and to distinguish two different sources of inequality: (i) inequality in the labour attachment and (ii) inequality in the remuneration of each working hour. Considering working hours as a measure of effort,...

Using state-level variation over time in the top deciles of the income distribution, we observe that non-rich households consume a larger share of their current income when exposed to a higher top income and consumption levels. We argue that permanent income, wealth effects, and upward local...