scholarly journals China's Post-Socialist Inequality

2012 ◽  
Vol 111 (746) ◽  
pp. 229-234 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin King Whyte
Keyword(s):  
Income Inequality ◽  
Sharp Increase ◽  
The Poor ◽  
The Rich

The country's sharp increase in income inequality is not the result of the rich getting richer while the poor become poorer.

The effects of debt restructurings on income inequality in the developing world

2021 ◽  
pp. 135406612110014
Author(s):  
Glen Biglaiser ◽  
Ronald J. McGauvran
Keyword(s):  
Developing Countries ◽  
Panel Data ◽  
Income Inequality ◽  
Income Distribution ◽  
Government Spending ◽  
Tax Reform ◽  
Social Spending ◽  
The Poor ◽  
The Rich ◽  
The Impact

Developing countries, saddled with debts, often prefer investors absorb losses through debt restructurings. By not making full repayments, debtor governments could increase social spending, serving poorer constituents, and, in turn, lowering income inequality. Alternatively, debtor governments could reduce taxes and cut government spending, bolstering the assets of the rich at the expense of the poor. Using panel data for 71 developing countries from 1986 to 2016, we assess the effects of debt restructurings on societal income distribution. Specifically, we study the impact of debt restructurings on social spending, tax reform, and income inequality. We find that countries receiving debt restructurings tend to use their newly acquired economic flexibility to reduce taxes and lower social spending, worsening income inequality. The results are also robust to different model specifications. Our study contributes to the globalization and the poor debate, suggesting the economic harm caused to the less well-off following debt restructurings.

Income Inequality, Life Satisfaction, and Economic Worries

2016 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 133-141 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bettina Roth ◽  
Elisabeth Hahn ◽  
Frank M. Spinath
Keyword(s):  
Life Satisfaction ◽  
Income Inequality ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Panel Study ◽  
National Level ◽  
Negative Relationship ◽  
Income Disparity ◽  
Negative Effects ◽  
The Poor ◽  
The Rich

We analyzed the effect of income inequality on Germans’ life satisfaction considering factors explaining the mechanism of this relationship. Based on data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study for the years 1984 to 2012, we found a negative relationship between national-level income disparity and average life satisfaction, meaning that people felt happier in years with lower inequality. The effect was completely mediated by economic worries, which increased with rising inequality and in turn reduced people’s satisfaction. However, people’s reaction to inequality depended on their income level: Considering the direct effect of inequality, higher income disparity was clearly detrimental only for the poor and the middle class. Moreover, we found a significant mediation through economic worries for the middle class but not for the poor. The rich showed a more complex pattern of interrelations with both, positive and negative effects of inequality when controlling for economic worries.

A Comparative Study of Inequality and Corruption

2005 ◽  
Vol 70 (1) ◽  
pp. 136-157 ◽  
Author(s):  
You Jong-sung ◽  
Sanjeev Khagram
Keyword(s):  
Income Inequality ◽  
Instrumental Variables ◽  
Significant Interaction ◽  
Explanatory Power ◽  
Significant Interaction Effect ◽  
The Poor ◽  
The World ◽  
Corruption Index ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Control Of Corruption

This article argues that income inequality increases the level of corruption through material and normative mechanisms. The wealthy have both greater motivation and more opportunity to engage in corruption, whereas the poor are more vulnerable to extortion and less able to monitor and hold the rich and powerful accountable as inequality increases. Inequality also adversely affects social norms about corruption and people's beliefs about the legitimacy of rules and institutions, thereby making it easier for them to tolerate corruption as acceptable behavior. This comparative analysis of 129 countries using two-stage least squares methods with a variety of instrumental variables supports the authors' hypotheses using different measures of corruption (the World Bank's Control of Corruption Index and the Transparency International's Corruption Perceptions Index). The explanatory power of inequality is at least as important as conventionally accepted causes of corruption such as economic development. The authors also found a significant interaction effect between inequality and democracy, as well as evidence that inequality affects norms and perceptions about corruption using the World Values Surveys data. Because corruption also contributes to income inequality, societies often fall into vicious circles of inequality and corruption.

Inequality and Neighbourhood Effects

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Namrata Gulati ◽  
Tridip Ray
Keyword(s):  
Income Inequality ◽  
Health Care Services ◽  
Service Providers ◽  
Market Access ◽  
Consumer Surplus ◽  
Neighbourhood Effects ◽  
Care Services ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Complete Exclusion ◽  
The Rich

The key insight in our research is to recognize inequality–neighbourhood interaction: neighbourhood effects interacting with income inequality may affect poor people’s ability to access basic facilities like health-care services, schooling, and so on. While Gulati and Ray (2016) model this interaction on a monopolist service provider in a neighbourhood structured as a linear city where rich and poor consumers live side by side, in this chapter we extend the analysis to a competitive framework with free entry and exit where the natural neighbourhood structure is a circular city. We find inverted-U shape relationships between income inequality and market access and welfare of the poor: if we compare a cross-section of societies, the poor community as a whole is initially better off living in relatively richer societies, but, beyond a point, the aggregate market access and consumer surplus of the poor starts declining as society becomes richer. We identify the possibility of complete exclusion of the poor from the market: a scenario where the service providers cater only to the rich and the poor have absolutely no market access, and find that it is the higher income gap between rich and poor that exposes the poor to this unfortunate outcome.

Income Inequality in India

2019 ◽  
pp. 356-363
Author(s):  
Ngozi Bosede Adeleye ◽  
M. Abdul Jamal ◽  
M. Fakir Ismail ◽  
S. Mohamed Nazeer
Keyword(s):  
Income Inequality ◽  
Social Inequality ◽  
Economic Reforms ◽  
Agricultural Growth ◽  
Material Resources ◽  
Sustained Growth ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Or Groups ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Employment Education

Social inequality means that certain individuals or groups have more material resources than others. Poverty implies some insufficiency in the material resources of an individual or group. The exploitation of the poor by the rich can be contained by reducing the level of inequality between the rich and the poor, which in turn depends upon reducing poverty through economic reforms. If economic reforms bring about steady and sustained growth in the economy, the poor could benefit in two ways. First, experience has shown that growth (particularly the agricultural growth) trickles down to the poor. Second, sustained growth creates an environment that is, on the whole, congenial for empowerment of the poor. The dependence of the poor on the groups dominating them becomes less precarious owing to expansion of opportunities for employment, education, occupational mobility, and for achieving higher social status.

Stock and Labor Market Synchronization and Income Inequality: Evidence from OECD Countries

2018 ◽  
Vol 09 (01n02) ◽  
pp. 1850003
Author(s):  
Jie Li ◽  
Alice Y. Ouyang
Keyword(s):  
Labor Market ◽  
Income Inequality ◽  
Stock Market ◽  
Labor Markets ◽  
Oecd Countries ◽  
Capital Gains ◽  
Monetary Expansion ◽  
Market Participants ◽  
The Poor ◽  
The Rich

This paper formally tests how the synchronization of stock and labor markets can affect income inequality. The responsiveness of stock and labor markets to a monetary expansion is different, i.e., a stock market, in general, tends to respond much faster than labor market. When there is monetary expansion, stock market participants (usually the rich) can enjoy capital gains quicker than labor market participants (usually the poor). However, if a labor market is more synchronized with a stock market, the capital gains a rich can enjoy in a stock market would be faster matched by labor market response, leading to a shrinking income inequality. We empirically confirm the prediction with different synchronization measures, controlling endogeneity issues.

scholarly journals Why is Income Inequality Growing?

Contexts ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
pp. 86-87
Author(s):  
Rebecca Krisel
Keyword(s):  
Income Inequality ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Political Implications ◽  
The Rich

Rebecca Krisel on Review of Class Attitudes in America: Sympathy for the Poor, Resentment of the Rich, and Political Implications by Spencer Piston.

scholarly journals Is income inequality unjust? Perspectives from political philosophy

2011 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Xavier Marquez
Keyword(s):  
Economic Growth ◽  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Income Inequality ◽  
Life Expectancy ◽  
Social Mobility ◽  
Relative Deprivation ◽  
The Poor ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Teenage Births ◽  
Rich Countries

Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett have argued recently (Wilkinson and Pickett, 2010) that income inequality produces many kinds of social and health problems in rich countries.1 High rates of infant mortality, teenage births, crime and obesity, educational under-achievement, low life expectancy, social mobility and many other social problems are worse, they claim, in more unequal societies. They further argue that these problems are caused not by absolute deprivation (poverty) but by relative deprivation, and that they are best addressed by compressing the income distribution, even if this means slowing or entirely stopping economic growth. Moreover, their argument has the further implication that more could be done for underprivileged groups in society by reducing the gap between the rich and the poor than by investing more resources in public services.

scholarly journals Burden Sharing: Income, Inequality and Willingness to Fight

2018 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 363-379
Author(s):  
Christopher J. Anderson ◽  
Anna Getmansky ◽  
Sivan Hirsch-Hoefler
Keyword(s):  
Income Inequality ◽  
Military Service ◽  
Burden Sharing ◽  
World Values Survey ◽  
Country Level ◽  
The Poor ◽  
The World ◽  
The Rich

What explains citizens’ willingness to fight for their country in times of war? Using six waves of the World Values Survey, this study finds that individual willingness to fight is negatively related with country-level income inequality. When income inequality is high, the rich are less willing to fight than the poor. When inequality is low, the poor and rich differ little in their willingness to fight. This change in the willingness to fight between low and high inequality countries is greater among the rich than among the poor. This article explores several explanations for these findings. The data are consistent with the argument that high inequality makes it more attractive for the rich to buy themselves out of military service.

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