Search results for "equality"
showing 10 items of 1338 documents
National fiscal consolidations and regional inequality in Europe
2016
Using annual data for 13 European countries over the period 1980-2008, we assess the impact of national fiscal consolidations on the income inequality of European regions. Regional dispersion increases in the outcome of consolidation episodes, particularly, when packages are more severe and implemented through spending cuts rather than tax rises. From a policy perspective, these findings suggest that fiscal consolidations driven by reductions in government spending can exacerbate regional disparities and may ultimately counteract the European policy efforts to promote territorial cohesion. Our results are robust to alternative inequality measures, the occurrence of crisis episodes and the e…
Fiscal adjustments and income inequality: a first assessment
2012
Using a statistical approach to identify fiscal adjustments, we find that fiscal consolidation appears to shorten the income gap. Fiscal austerity plans that succeed in bringing public debt to a sustainable path seem to be more likely to reduce inequality. Expansionary fiscal adjustments are particularly important to promote changes in the income distribution.
Income inequality, fiscal stimuli and political (in)stability
2016
Using data for a large panel of countries, this paper investigates the role played by income inequality and fiscal stimuli episodes in shaping the likelihood of political stability. By means of Tobit estimations, we show that a rise in inequality increases the probability of government crises. However, such adverse distributional effect is reduced when expansionary or increasingly expansionary fiscal stimuli episodes or successful fiscal stimuli programs are put in place.
Financial Reforms and Income Inequality
2012
Available online 8 June 2012
Intertemporal and interprovincial variations in income inequality: Spain, 1973–1991
2002
Goerlich F. J. and Mas M. (2002) Intertemporal and interprovincial variations in income inequality: Spain, 1973–1991, Reg. Studies 36, 1005–1015. The paper presents the main findings on personal income distribution for the Spanish provinces over the period 1973–91. The information comes from the three structural Household Budget Surveys and has been elaborated by the authors on a homogeneous base (available at: http://www.ivie.es). It starts by reviewing the information provided by some dispersion statistics, including kernel density functions, applied to the provincial Gini indices and Lorenz percentiles. It goes on to test, making use of an ANOVA model, two propositions related with inter…
Systems-dynamic analysis of employment and inequality impacts of low-carbon investments
2016
Abstract This paper provides a macroeconomic framework to evaluate the social and economic consequences generated by a shift of investment to low-carbon options. We introduce into a standard growth framework a modified Lotka–Volterra model for wage and employment determination to address both the long-run dynamics of the economic system in terms of carbon emission and GDP growth and the short-term macroeconomic fluctuations in terms of unemployment and inequality. We use this framework to compare the results of different combinations of three strategies for carbon emissions reductions: improvement in energy efficiency, expansion of the renewable energy sector, and the direct reduction in ca…
Political, Institutional, and Economic Factors Underlying Deficit Volatility
2013
It is well known that fiscal policy can counter-cyclically smooth out the effect of unexpected shocks and public deficit volatility may reflect the (optimal) policy response to them. However, the welfare losses associated to fiscal instability are also an important challenge for many countries, as it typically implies an inefficient allocation of resources, higher sovereign risk premium and an inadequate provision of public services. In this paper, we empirically analyze the political, institutional, and economic sources of public deficit volatility. Using the system-generalized method-of-moments (GMM) estimator for linear dynamic panel data models and a sample of 125 countries analyzed fro…
Intralocus sexual conflict for fitness: sexually antagonistic alleles for testosterone
2011
Intralocus sexual conflict occurs when a trait encoded by the same genetic locus in the two sexes has different optima in males and females. Such conflict is widespread across taxa, however, the shared phenotypic traits that mediate the conflict are largely unknown. We examined whether the sex hormone, testosterone (T), that controls sexual differentiation, contributes to sexually antagonistic fitness variation in the bank vole, Myodes glareolus . We compared (opposite-sex) sibling reproductive fitness in the bank vole after creating divergent selection lines for T. This study shows that selection for T was differentially associated with son versus daughter reproductive success, causing a …
Flexible parental care: Uniparental incubation in biparentally incubating shorebirds
2017
The relative investment of females and males into parental care might depend on the population’s adult sex-ratio. For example, all else being equal, males should be the more caring sex if the sex-ratio is male biased. Whether such outcomes are evolutionary fixed (i.e. related to the species’ typical sex-ratio) or whether they arise through flexible responses of individuals to the current population sex-ratio remains unclear. Nevertheless, a flexible response might be limited by the evolutionary history of the species, because one sex may have lost the ability to care or because a single parent cannot successfully raise the brood. Here, we demonstrate that after the disappearance of one pare…
Women's preferences for men's facial masculinity are strongest under favorable ecological conditions
2019
AbstractThe strength of sexual selection on secondary sexual traits varies depending on prevailing economic and ecological conditions. In humans, cross-cultural evidence suggests women’s preferences for men’s testosterone dependent masculine facial traits are stronger under conditions where health is compromised, male mortality rates are higher and economic development is higher. Here we use a sample of 4483 exclusively heterosexual women from 34 countries and employ mixed effects modelling to test how social, ecological and economic variables predict women’s facial masculinity preferences. We report women’s preferences for more masculine looking men are stronger in countries with higher so…