This short paper uses a newly compiled cross-country panel data on income distribution to explore the impact of inflation on income distribution and economic growth. We have found that inflation (1) worsens income distribution; (2) increases the income share of the rich; (3) has a negative but...

China has experienced one of the most remarkable increase in inequality over the last decade: the Gini coefficient increasing from 25.7 in 1984 to 37.8 in 1992. Using the recent developments in the theory of income distribution (Benerjee and Newman, 1993; Galor and Zeira, 1993) and a new panel data...

This paper uses an encompassing framework developed by Murphy et al. (1991, 1993) to study corruption and how it affects income distribution and growth. We find that (1) corruption affects income distribution in an inverted U-shaped way, (2) corruption alone also explains a large proportion of...

This study of China demonstrates how the allocation of fiscal resources between the central and local governments has affected economic growth since reforms began in the late 1970s. We find that a higher degree of fiscal decentralization of government spending is associated with lower provincial...

Theory suggests that a close match between revenue and expenditure assignments at sub-national levels benefits allocative efficiency, and hence economic growth. That is, a convergence of revenue and expenditure assignments at sub-national levels of government should, according to the theory, be...

China's remarkable poverty alleviation is quite uneven across regions in the last quarter of the century. It is important to explore why China has such huge disparity in poverty distribution in spite of overall dramatic economic growth and the vast improvement in per capita income. The aim of...