Search results for "economic inequality"
showing 10 items of 58 documents
What Explains the Long-term Evolution of Regional Income Inequality in Spain?
2018
This chapter analyses the proximate causes of territorial inequality. To do this per-capita income inequality is broken down into elements related to differences in regional labour markets and elements linked to the presence of differences in labour productivity between regions. Then the factors that determine these differences in productivity are examined by carrying out a number of quantitative exercises to see whether or not they are in some way connected to the territories’ different production structures or whether they are due to the different levels of productivity registered by each sector on a regional scale. This set of exercises shows which of the potential explanatory factors wa…
The legal origin of income inequality
2014
The legal origin movement is implicitly functionalist, while it explicitly prioritizes economic dimensions of development. From this perspective, the empirical findings presented in this paper seem to uncover the existence of a paradox. On the one hand, common law countries are apparently characterized by countless advantages, yet they do not grow faster than civil law countries. On the other hand, common law countries present a more unequal distribution of income, thus suggesting that also from a static perspective there is no a priori reason to prefer a common law system. To further investigate this paradox, we analyze if common law countries are at least characterized by a better kind (e…
THE BETWEEN-COUNTRY INEQUALITY: DOES IT HINDER THE COMPETITIVENESS?
2012
Nowadays the competitiveness is the significant premise to enhance the inhabitants well being. From this perspective on competitiveness has been given great attention in the literature and competitiveness hindrances have been studied as well. However the link between inequality and competitiveness is less studied, particular in case of the European Union. Thereby the author attempts to clarify the role of the between-country income inequality in hindering the competitiveness.The data analysis shows that lower income countries have less ability towards strengthening the nation economy competitiveness thereby reducing overall European Union competitiveness level. Obviously the country's compe…
Socio-economic inequalities and organized crime: An empirical analysis
2020
In this chapter we contribute to the recent literature (e.g., Istat, 2010, Acciari et al., 2016, Guell et al., 2017) that provides evidence that inequality is high and social mobility is low in the Italian regions and prov-inces where organized crime is widespread such as those of Southern Italy. We complement this line of work in two respects. First, using a novel pan-el dataset at the regional level for the period 1985-2014 we investigate the relationship between inequality and organized crime at the regional level, exploiting both time and cross-sectional variation. Second, we assess the role of social mobility in organized crime. Our main finding is that higher inequality leads to highe…
Effects of unconventional monetary policy on income and wealth distribution: Evidence from United States and Eurozone
2019
As an answer to the “Great Recession” and Zero Lower Bound problem, main central banks had to use unconventional monetary policy (UMP). This research focuses on the distributive effects of these measures on household income and household wealth in the United States of America (USA) and the Eurozone. For this purpose, this paper presents four models that were constructed using the Structural Vector Autoregressive methodology (SVAR). The results suggest that the UMPs applied by the Federal Reserve (FED) in the USA could increase wealth and income inequality through the portfolio channel. However, the same results were not observed in the Eurozone. Key words: United States of America, Eurozone…
The effects of monetary policy shocks on inequality
2018
Abstract This paper provides new evidence of the effect of conventional monetary policy shocks on income inequality. We construct a measure of unanticipated changes in policy rates—changes in short-term interest rates that are orthogonal to unexpected changes in growth and inflation news—for a panel of 32 advanced and emerging market countries over the period 1990–2013. Our main finding is that contractionary monetary policy shocks increase income inequality, on average. The effect is asymmetric—tightening of policy raises inequality more than easing lowers it—and depends on the state of the business cycle. We find some evidence that the effect increases with the share of labor income and i…
Inflation shocks and income inequality
2019
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to analyze the effects of inflationary shocks on inequality, using data of selected countries of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Design/methodology/approach Inflationary shocks were measured as deviations from core inflation, based on a genetic algorithm. Bayesian quantile regression was used to estimate the impact of inflationary shocks in different levels of inequality. Findings The results showed that inflationary shocks substantially affect countries with higher levels of inequality, thus suggesting that the detrimental impact of inflation is exacerbated by the high division of classes in a country. Originality/value The study contributes t…
What Explains Prevalence of Informal Employment in European Countries: The Role of Labor Institutions, Governance, Immigrants, and Growth
2011
This paper looks into institutional and other macro determinants of prevalence of informal dependent employment, as well as informal self-employment, in European countries, using European Social Survey data on work without legal contract in on 30 countries, covering years 2004-2009. Consistently with theoretical predictions, quality of business environment has a significant negative impact on prevalence of both types of informal employment. The share of non-contracted employees is negatively affected by perceived quality of public services and positively related to economic growth. Informal self-employment is positively related to growth in Europe at large, as well as in Eastern and Souther…
Can Differences in Characteristics Explain Ethnic Wage Gap in Latvia?
2017
Abstract We used anonymized micro data from Labour Force Survey to estimate the ethnic wage gap in Latvia and find the factors that explain it. We found that a notable ethnic wage gap still exists in Latvia with non-Latvians earning 10 % less than Latvians in 2015. The results of Oaxaca-Ransom decomposition show that approximately two thirds of the ethnic wage gap are explained by differences in characteristics with the most important effects in favour of Latvians caused by segregation in better paying occupational groups, having Latvian citizenship and better education (higher education levels and more favourable segregation by education fields). This was partly offset by favourable segreg…
Unemployment and the Earnings Structure in Latvia
2005
Latvia has recorded sustained GDP and productivity growth since 1997. Yet unemployment rates, despite gradual decrease, have remained high. The paper explores the mysteries of unemployment in Latvia. It analyzes labor flows between employment, unemployment, and nonparticipation and finds the following results: The type of education and the region of residence appear to be the most important determinants of success in finding jobs by the unemployed. The unemployed from ethnic minorities have lower chances to find a job within a year, other things equal, while the difference between genders is not significant. However, neither ethnicity nor gender seems to matter as far as the transition from…