Search results for "economic inequality"
showing 10 items of 58 documents
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…
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.
Human Capital Inequality and Economic Growth: Some New Evidence
2002
This paper provides new measures of human capital inequality for a broad panel of countries. Taking attainment levels from Barro and Lee (2001), we compute Gini coefficients and the distribution of education by quintiles for 108 countries over five-year intervals from 1960 to 2000. Using this new cross-country data on human capital inequality two main conclusions are obtained. First, most countries in the world have tended to reduce the inequality in human capital distribution. Second, human capital inequality measures provide more robust results than income inequality measures in the estimation of standard growth and investment equations.
No evidence that economic inequality moderates the effect of income on generosity
2019
A landmark study published in PNAS [Côté S, House J, Willer R (2015) Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 112:15838–15843] showed that higher income individuals are less generous than poorer individuals only if they reside in a US state with comparatively large economic inequality. This finding might serve to reconcile inconsistent findings on the effect of social class on generosity by highlighting the moderating role of economic inequality. On the basis of the importance of replicating a major finding before readily accepting it as evidence, we analyzed the effect of the interaction between income and inequality on generosity in three large representative datasets. We analyzed the donating behavior of…
Reply to Côté and Willer: New replication attempts provide no evidence that inequality moderates the effect of income on generosity
2020
Cote et al. (1) provided evidence that economic inequality moderates the effect of income on generosity. In their study, individuals with higher household income were less generous in a dictator game than poorer individuals only if they resided in a US state with comparatively large economic inequality. We questioned this finding because we did not find any evidence for the postulated moderation effect of economic inequality across three studies (ref. 2; for similar replication failures see ref. 3). However, our studies were conceptual rather than direct replications as we used different measures of generosity (charitable donations, behavior in a trust game, and volunteering) and also inclu…
Equal Pay for a Green Future
2020
In the present chapter, challenges to our growth-driven political-economic model are identified—including lethal economic inequality, growing unrest, technological unemployment in an era of robotization and artificial intelligence (AI), and limits to growth at a time of environmental and climatic collapse. The author is hesitant to offer a “yes” or “no” answer to the question of equal pay, suggesting instead that the answer hinges on time and context. In a future world of limited material resources, where jobs are increasingly automated and substituted by AI algorithms, the legitimacy of inequality-producing incentives for the main exploiters of resources and robots will erode. At a time wh…
Life Satisfaction Among Children in Different Family Structures: A Comparative Study of 36 Western Societies
2010
This paper examines differences in life satisfaction among children in different family structures in 36 western, industrialised countries (n = 184 496). Children living with both biological parents reported higher levels of life satisfaction than children living with a single parent or parent–step-parent. Children in joint physical custody reported significantly higher levels of life satisfaction than their counterparts in other types of non-intact families. Controlling perceived family affluence, the difference between joint physical custody families and single mother or mother–stepfather families became non-significant. Difficulties in communicating with parents were strongly associated …
National-Level Wealth Inequality and Socioeconomic Inequality in Adolescent Mental Well-Being: A Time Series Analysis of 17 Countries
2020
Purpose: Although previous research has established a positive association between national income inequality and socioeconomic inequalities in adolescent health, very little is known about the extent to which national-level wealth inequalities (i.e., accumulated financial resources) are associated with these inequalities in health. Therefore, this study examined the association between national wealth inequality and income inequality and socioeconomic inequality in adolescents' mental well-being at the aggregated level. Methods: Data were from 17 countries participating in three consecutive waves (2010, 2014, and 2018) of the cross-sectional Health Behaviour in School-aged Children study. …
Mating (marriage) patterns and economic development
2011
This paper looks at the relationship between economic development and mating (marriage) patterns in the very long run. For this purpose we introduce the Goldin and the Kuznets curves which relate female labour and income inequality with economic development respectively. To some extent, the Goldin and the Kuznets curves have followed opposite paths, which in turn, could illustrate how economic development has had an impact on mating (marriage) patterns, and thus household formation. Convergence in mating patterns among hunter-gatherers across societies vanished after the Neolithic revolution. Then, African polygyny and the ‘European’ marriage pattern developed into the most significant exce…
Autonomy Freedom and Preferences for Redistribution
2007
In this paper we study the determinants of people's attitudes toward income inequality and their consequences for redistributive policies. In the light of a recent literature in social choice theory, we argue that an individual's attitudes toward inequality depend upon the extent of autonomy freedom he/she enjoys. We use individual level data to validate our theory and show that the higher the extent of an individual's autonomy freedom, the greater the probability that he/she supports larger income differences as incentives for individual effort. Conversely, the lower the extent of autonomy freedom, the more likely he/she supports the view that incomes should be made more equal. These findi…