This chapter presents an approach to the analysis of the personal distribution of income and pay consistent with post-Keynesian economic analysis. Since the Keynesian tradition is macroeconomic, this raises the question: what is the relationship between inequality and macroeconomics? After a brief discussion of theory and review of recent work in related traditions, the chapter surveys empirical efforts to develop dense and consistent measures of economic inequality suitable for use in macroeconomic studies, using a method based on the between-groups component of Theil’s T statistic. A principal contribution is to show that dense and consistent inequality measures can be computed from many diverse and mundane sources of information, including regional tax collections, employment and earnings, census of manufacturing, and harmonized international industrial data sets. The rich data environment so constructed permits new analyses of patterns of economic change, by region, by sector, and by country, and broadly supports the idea that the movement of inequality is closely related to macroeconomic events at the national and the global level, including war, revolution, and financial crises. Indeed, there is strong evidence that the movement of inequality within countries is dominated by a single global pattern, closely related to changes in the international financial regime.
Macroeconomic assessment of possible Green Recovery scenarios in Visegrad countries
