Economic zones can be powerful drivers of economic growth in developing countries. However, less is known about their distributional impact on the local society. This paper provides empirical evidence from Indonesian provinces on the relationship between economic zones and within-province income...

It is shown that the pecking order of corporate financing causes perpetual growth in corporate income inequality via concentrated growth of capital income share in total corporate income. Moreover, equity financing is shown to cause a perpetual decline in corporate income inequality via...

This paper assesses how pro-poor and inclusive Asia's recent growth has been, and what factors have been driving these outcomes. It finds that while poverty has fallen across the region over the last two decades, inequality has increased, dampening the impact of growth on poverty reduction. As a...

Analyzing unique data on loan applications by individuals who are majority owners of small firms, we detail how a bank's credit decisions affect their future income. We use the bank's cutoff rule, which is based on the applicants' credit scores, as the discontinuous locus providing exogenous...

This paper challenges the conventional wisdom that income inequality in Poland increased substantially following the economic transition in 1989-90. The results, based on micro data from the 1985-92 Household Budget Surveys, indicate that overall income inequality increased during the initial...

This paper challenges the conventional wisdom that inequality in Poland increased markedly during the economic transition. Income and consumption inequality actually declined in 1990-92 and rose only moderately above pre-transition levels by 1997. However, inequality in labor earnings increased...

Although urban China has experienced spectacular income growth over the last two decades, increases in inequality, reduction in social welfare provision, deregulation of grain prices, and increases in income uncertainty in the 1990s have increased urban poverty. Using a large repeated...

Although urban China has experienced a rapid income growth over the last twenty years, nutrition intake for the low income group declined in the 1990s. Does this imply a zero or negative income elasticity for the low income group? This paper examines this issue using large representative sample...

We develop a model of the interdependencies between migration, remittances and inequality, and investigate how migration and subsequent remittances affect inter-household inequality in the origin communities. An important feature of our model is that we take into account the impact of migration...

The transitional economies of Eastern Europe (EE) and the former Soviet Union (FSU) experienced a dramatic increase in income inequality in the 1990s. In this paper I investigate the causes of unprecedented changes in income distribution using a unique panel of inequality estimates for 24...