After decades of war, ending in 1992, Mozambique embarked on a path of sustained economic growth and substantial poverty reduction. However, these positive dynamics started to revert from 2015, with per capita growth rates getting close to zero and household real consumption reducing in all...

In recent years numerous studies published top income shares as way to assess the degree of income inequality. Top income shares measure how much percent of total income is captured by a certain top income group. Based on the assumption that high incomes follow a Pareto distribution, estimates...

Poverty prediction models are used by economists to address missing data issues in a variety of contexts such as poverty profiling, targeting with proxy-means tests, cross-survey imputations such as poverty mapping, or vulnerability analyses. Based on the models used by this literature, this...

In this paper we argue that the decline in global inequality over the last decades has spurred a ‘sunshine’ narrative of falling global inequality that has been rather oversold, in the sense, we argue, it is likely to be temporary. We argue the decline in global inequality will reverse due...

China’s high income and wealth inequality has long attracted the interest of policymakers and re-searchers, yet surprisingly little has been done since 2010 on inequality trends. Given China’s evolving economic structure and the government’s adoption of new policy tools in recent years, we...

This research exploits novel evidence on current and historical inequality dynamics, as well as an instrumental variable (IV) strategy (founded on historical settler mortality à la Acemoglu et al.), to document the fundamental role of income redistribution through taxes and transfers in...

We study the distribution of income across Indian states for 2014-19 and find significant heterogeneity in income inequality. Particularly concerning in terms of high inequality are states of Uttar Pradesh, Telangana, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Gujarat, Punjab, and Haryana –...

In recent years, policymaking in China has put increasing emphasis on stemming the growth in inequality, which had been fairly steep since the 1980s. Policy action has taken the form of regional development measures and of reforms of various aspects of the social safety net broadly defined. The...

This paper studies the effects of globalisation on the income share of the middle class. Our findings suggest that globalisation, proxied by the KOF Economic Globalisation Index, reduces the income share of the middle class. The income share of the poorest 20% also drops due to globalisation,...

We examine the causal effect of natural resource discoveries on income inequality using the synthetic control method on data from 1947 to 2009. We focus on the natural discoveries in Denmark, Netherlands and Norway in the 1960-1970s and use top 1% and top 10% income share as the measure of...