Search results for " inequality."
showing 10 items of 809 documents
How does fiscal consolidation impact on income inequality?
2012
In this paper, we assess the impact of fiscal consolidation on income inequality. Using a panel of 18 industrialized countries from 1978 to 2009, we find that income inequality significantly rises during periods of fiscal consolidation. In addition, while fiscal policy that is driven by spending cuts seems to be detrimental for income distribution, tax hikes seem to have an equalizing effect. We also show that the size of the fiscal consolidation program (in percentage of GDP) has an impact on income inequality. In particular, when consolidation plans represent a small share of GDP, the income gap widens, suggesting that the burden associated with the effort affects disproportionately house…
Youth Transition from School to Work in Spain
2001
Using a data set drawn from the Encuesta Socio-Demográfica conducted by the Instituto Nacional de Estadística in 1991, we analyze the labor market entrance of Spanish school leavers and the match between education and work at the early stages of working life. The empirical evidence shows that human capital exerts a strong influence on the duration of unemployment. With regard to the job match between education and work we find that young workers are more likely to be underutilized compared to their adult co-workers. Regression results indicate that people with higher education have, all else being equal, a lower probability of being overeducated and a shorter lenght of unemployment. They al…
Human Capital Inequality, Life Expectancy and Economic Growth
2006
This article presents a model in which inequality affects per capita income when individuals decide to invest in education taking into account their life expectancy, which depends to a large extent on the human capital of their parents. Our results show the existence of multiple steady states depending on the initial distribution of education. The low steady state is a poverty trap in which children raised in poor families have low life expectancy and work as non-educated workers. The empirical evidence suggests that the life expectancy mechanism explains a major part of the relationship between inequality and human capital accumulation. Increases in life expectancy and human capital accumu…
Demand for Primary Schooling in Rural Mali : Should User Fees Be Increased ?
1996
International audience; This paper presents estimates of the price elasticity of demand for primary schooling, using household and school survey data from rural Mali. The elasticity of enrolment with respect to the local school fee is compared with the effects on enrolment of distance to the school and various indicators of school quality, including books per classroom and the number of grades offered. Fees have a negative effect; however, certain improvements in school quality could easily offset in terms of enrolment any negative effect of higher fees to finance such improvements. For example, the astonishingly low average of two books per classroom could be doubled for a 10 per cent incr…
Inference for Lorenz curve orderings
1999
In this paper we consider the issue of performing statistical inference for Lorenz curve orderings. This involves testing for an ordered relationship in a multivariate context and making comparisons among more than two population distributions. Our approach is to frame the hypotheses of interest as sets of linear inequality constraints on the vector of Lorenz curve ordinates, and apply order-restricted statistical inference to derive test statistics and their sampling distributions. We go on to relate our results to others which have appeared in recent literature, and use Monte Carlo analysis to highlight their respective properties and comparative performances. Finally, we discuss in gener…
The effects of monetary policy on income and wealth inequality in the U.S. Exploring different channels
2020
We assess the effects of monetary policy shocks on income and wealth inequality through direct inequality measures and by analyzing several transmission channels explored in recent literature. Furthermore, we analyze two additional channels: the Housing and the Fiscal channels. The methodology adopted is a Bayesian proxy SVAR using a high-frequency identification based on the external instruments approach. Our own policy shocks are constructed for this purpose. The results show that an expansionary monetary policy shock does not have a significant effect on income inequality due to the existence of opposite channels, whereas it increases wealth inequality mainly through the portfolio channe…
Finance, globalisation, technology and inequality: Do nonlinearities matter?
2021
Abstract Relying on data for 90 economies over 1970-2015 and panel estimation techniques, we investigate how financial development, globalisation and technology affect income inequality. Our findings reveal significant nonlinearities, consistent with either Ushaped or inverted-U shaped relationships. As such, depending on whether a certain threshold value is achieved, the same determinants of income distribution exert opposite effects in different countries. Globalisation is associated with increasing inequality in most advanced economies, but with falling disparities for the large majority of emerging economies. Technology and financial development lead to increasing inequality for most em…
Inequality in Spain 1973-91: Contribution to a regional database
2001
This paper provides the methodology and results of a database of inequality indices for the fifty provinces and seventeen regions of Spain on the basis of the Household Budget Surveys for the years 1973/74, 1980/81 and 1990/91. The inequality indicators considered are the indices of Gini, Theil (0), Theil (1) and Atkinson (1), as well as the distribution by deciles of the population. These indicators are drawn up for three variables: total income, total expenditure, and exclusively monetary expenditure. The variables are also expressed in terms of households, per capita and per capita equivalent. All are available on the Internet (http://www.ivie.es).
Can stability of foreign aid agreement reduce global income inequality?
2017
Abstract Global initiatives on debt relief call for increasing foreign aid assistance to alleviate income inequality. But the potential gains from foreign aid policy coordination may be limited by the willing participation of diverse and self-interested donor countries. If stability of the foreign aid agreement does not occur, then aid effectiveness fails. Thus, the aim of this paper is to investigate the effects of the stability of foreign aid agreement on income redistribution amongst countries. The findings show that stability has positive effects on income mobility from the rich to the poorest countries reducing global income inequality.
Social inequality at school and educational policies
2003
This study looks at the links between school and social inequalities, both the way in which school may cultivate such inequalities, and the educational policies that can play a role in limiting them. The booklet provides what is one of only very few summaries of the plentiful literature devoted to the subject. It reveals the scale and various aspects of social inequalities, and, with reference to sociological research, discusses their origin both within families and in the daily functioning of schools and the classroom. This is followed by a description of educational policies for reducing inequalities in the school careers of children and young people, ranging from classroom-based measures…