Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

How Long Will It Take To Lift One Billion People Out Of Poverty?, Martin Ravallion

Martin Ravallion

Alternative scenarios are considered for reducing by one billion the number of people living below $1.25 a day. The low-case, “pessimistic,” path to that goal would see the developing world outside China returning to its slower pace of growth and poverty reduction of the 1980s and 1990s, though with China maintaining its progress. This path would take another 50 years or more to lift one billion people out of poverty. The more optimistic path would maintain the (impressive) progress against poverty since 2000, which would instead reach the target by around 2025-30. This scenario is consistent with both linear projections …

Financialization And Income Inequality In Oecd Countries: 1995-2007, Basak Kus

BASAK KUS

No abstract provided.

Income Inequality In U.S. Metropolitan Areas: Which Areas Have The Greatest Inequality And Why?, C. Peterson Compton

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In recent years, much focus has been placed on the high and growing level of income inequality in the United States. This composition begins to fill a void in the existing literature by examining specific urban areas that have particularly high levels of inequality and the characteristics that factor into inequality. In this paper, I construct a qualitative model for a particularly unequal metropolitan area. I then apply the model to a set of U.S. metros that are among the most unequal in the country and share a particular set of characteristics consistent with the model.

Dynamic Poverty Decomposition Analysis: An Application To The Philippines, Tomoki Fujii

Research Collection School Of Economics

In this paper, we propose a new method of poverty decomposition. Our method remedies the shortcomings of existing methods and has some desirable properties such as time-reversion consistency and subperiod additivity. It integrates the existing methods of growth-redistribution decomposition and sector-based decomposition, because it allows us to decompose poverty change into growth and redistribution components for each group (e.g. regions or sectors) in the economy. We extend our method to have six components and provide an empirical application to the Philippines for the period 1985-2009.

Social Spending, Taxes And Income Redistribution In Uruguay, Maximo Rossi, Nora Lustig, Marisa Bucheli, Florencia Amabile

Maximo Rossi

How much redistribution does Uruguay accomplish through social spending and taxes? How progressive are revenue collection and social spending? A standard fiscal incidence analysis shows that Uruguay achieves a nontrivial reduction in inequality and poverty when all taxes and transfers are combined. In comparison with other five countries in Latin America, it ranks first (poverty reduction) and second (inequality reduction), and first in terms of poverty reduction effectiveness and third in terms of overall (including ransfers in kind) inequality reduction effectiveness. Direct taxes are progressive and indirect taxes are regressive. Social spending on direct transfers, contributory pensions, education and health …

Erasing Class/ (Re)Creating Ethnicity: Jobs, Politics, Accumulation And Identity In Kenya, Mwangi Wa Githinji

Economics Department Working Paper Series

A large literature on African economies argues that ethnicity plays a role in the politics and economics of African countries. Unfortunately, much of this literature is speculative or anecdotal because of the lack of data, with the exception of a few papers that examine ethnic networking as a business or employment strategy. In many ways Africa’s failure to develop is a failure of nationhood. Creating nation is handicapped by the use of ethnicity. In this paper, I empirically examine the relationship between employment, wages and ethnicity in Africa via a case study of Kenya. I challenge the pervasive view that …

Effects Of Income Inequality On Economic Growth, Madelyn Degutis

Honors Theses

Economic growth reflects the change in the overall well-being of a country and the standard of living of its population. It is important to understand what factors affect economic growth. This thesis hypothesizes that income inequality negatively affects growth. A country-level data set of 114 countries for 2000 and 2005 is used to estimate a growth model. The dependent variable, the five year average of economic growth per capita, is regressed on a set of standard factors (human capital, investment, and technology), institutional factors (political stability, corruption, and property rights), income inequality, and demographic factors (gender equality and racial diversity). …

Immigration And Reverse Brain Drain In South East Asia, Trang T. Tran

Honors Theses

In recent years, governments around the world have shown increasing concerns about brain drain, the shift in human intelligence of many of their best educated citizens from developing countries to developed countries, as it causes negative effects on social and economic sectors of the source country. Nonetheless, Kuhn and McAusland (2006) argue that talent might often be wasted at home; migration to more supportive environments raises global innovation. Saxenian (2003) finds that gains may flow back to the developing country via returnees with enhanced skills, personal connections, and ideas for innovation. This thesis studies the causes of immigration. The study …

Estimating Guard Labor, Arjun Jayadev

Arjun Jayadev

As a background paper to Jayadev and Bowles (2006), this paper provides details on our measure of guard labor as we measure these in labor units. Data from the United States indicate a significant increase in its extent in the U.S. over the period 1890 to the present. Cross-national comparisons show a significant statistical association between income inequality and the fraction of the labor force that is constituted by guard labor, as well as with measures of political legitimacy (inversely) and political conflict.

Procedural Paper Draft. Asset Inequality Conceptual Framework And Measurement Methodology, Luis A. Villasenor

Adrián Villaseñor

No abstract provided.

Resolving America's Human Capital Paradox: A Jobs Compact For The Future, Thomas A. Kochan

Upjohn Institute Policy Papers

It is widely recognized that human capital is essential to sustaining a competitive economy at high and rising living standards. Yet acceptance of persistent high unemployment, stagnant wages, and other indicators of declining job quality suggests that policymakers and employers undervalue human capital. This paper traces the root cause of this apparent paradox to the primacy afforded shareholder value over human resource considerations in American firms and the longstanding gridlock over employment policy. I suggest that a new jobs compact will be needed to close the deficit in jobs lost in the recent recession and to achieve sustained real wage …

America's Human Capital Paradox, Thomas A. Kochan

Upjohn Institute Working Papers

It is widely recognized that human capital is essential to sustaining a competitive economy at high and rising living standards. Yet acceptance of persistent high unemployment, stagnant wages, and other indicators of declining job quality suggests that policymakers and employers undervalue human capital. This paper traces the root cause of this apparent paradox to the primacy afforded shareholder value over human resource considerations in American firms and the longstanding gridlock over employment policy. I suggest that a new jobs compact will be needed to close the deficit in jobs lost in the recent recession and to achieve sustained real wage …

Micro-Finance Competition With Motivated Mfis, Brishti Guha, Prabal Roy Chowdhury

Research Collection School Of Economics

In this paper we examine the effect of increased MFI competition, focusing on its implications for borrower targeting, both in the presence and the absence of double-dipping. In the absence of competition we find that the loans are more likely to go to relatively richer borrowers whenever inequality is not too large, and the technology is sufficiently convex. In the presence of competition, the results depend on whether double-dipping is feasible or not. In case double-dipping is not feasible, we find that the MFIs necessarily target the richer borrowers. Interestingly, it turns out that double-dipping may encourage the MFIs to …

Decomposing The Sources Of Earnings Inequality: Assessing The Role Of Reallocation, Julia Ingrid Lane

Julia Ingrid Lane

This paper exploits longitudinal employer-employee matched data from the U.S. Census Bureau to investigate the contribution of worker and firm reallocation to changes in earnings inequality within and across industries between 1992 and 2003. We find that factors that cannot be measured using standard cross-sectional data, including the entry and exit of firms and the sorting of workers across firms, are important sources of changes in earnings distributions over time. Our results also suggest that the dynamics driving changes in earnings inequality are heterogeneous across industries.

Linking Development And Innovation: What Does Technological Change Bring To The Society?, Evgeny A. Klochikhin

Evgeny A. Klochikhin

Recently, there has been a popular trend in academic research for paying more attention to ‘pro-poor’ policies and theoretical studies. This tradition has emerged from a broader understanding of development that includes not only economic but also social and political dimensions. Meanwhile, innovation researchers are still considering development as mere economic growth without much focus on the social impacts of technological change. This article recognizes that, despite these fundamental differences, the concepts of innovation and development have much in common and are, in fact, positively connected and mutually beneficial. This assumption has some important implications for the innovation and development …

Nine Out Of Ten. The "Losers" In Italy's Long Crisis. Changes In Income Distribution, Effects Of Policies, Rise In Inequality, Mario Pianta

Mario Pianta