Working Paper
A 2017 Social Accounting Matrix for Myanmar
This paper documents the compilation of a 2017 Social Accounting Matrix for Myanmar. This is based on partial and unpublished National Accounts data and unpublished Supply and Use Table data, as well as Balance of Payment data and Government Finance...
Working Paper
Explaining income inequality trends
In large parts of the world, income inequality has been rising in recent decades. Other regions have experienced declining trends in income inequality. This raises the question of which mechanisms underlie contrasting observed trends in income...
Working Paper
Structural features of the Myanmar economy through the lens of a 2017 Social Accounting Matrix
Based on a recently constructed 2017 Social Accounting Matrix, we examine structural aspects of the Myanmar economy. The exposition ranges from industry, trade, household income, and expenditure to labour market issues. Agriculture remains dominant...
Working Paper
Exclusive growth?
Despite South Africa’s need for inclusive economic growth, we find that the income trajectories of the rich continue to diverge from the rest of the income distribution. We combine household survey data and tax data (which, unlike household survey...
Working Paper
Measuring the Labour Income Share of Developing Countries
This paper is the first to address the challenges of measuring the labour income share of developing countries. The poor availability and reliability of national accounts data, and the fact that self-employed people, whose labour income is hard to...
Working Paper
Reversal of the Kuznets Curve
This paper uses recently published top 1% income share series in studying the inequality– development association. The top income shares data are of high quality and cover about a century for some countries and thus provide an interesting opportunity...
Working Paper
Changing Income Inequality and Structural Transformation
In Sub-Saharan Africa we find some of the highest levels of income inequality in the world. Nevertheless, we generally know very little about the historical development of inequality. In this paper we look at how inequality developed in colonial and...
Policy Brief
Linking Globalization to Poverty in Asia, Latin America and Africa
Despite the enormous potential of globalization in accelerating economic growth through greater integration into the world economy the impact of globalization on poverty reduction has been uneven. Asia has been the major beneficiary of globalization...
Working Paper
Agricultural development, trade, and income distribution
This paper considers the impact of agriculture and international trade development on income distribution and economic activity in Mozambique. A social accounting matrix multiplier decomposition model is used—in particular, an extension of the...
Working Paper
Household Financial Assets in the Process of Development
Systematic information on household financial asset holdings in developing countries is very sparse; we review some available data and current policy debates. Although financial asset holdings by households are highly concentrated, deeper financial...
Working Paper
Financial Development, Growth, and Regional Disparity in Post-Reform China
Deepening financial development and rapid economic growth in China have been accompanied by widening income disparity between the coastal and inland regions. In this paper, by employing panel dataset for 29 Chinese provinces over the period of 1990...
Blog
The world’s new middles - Implications for the future of development and aid
The storyline The basic storyline of this blog is economic growth since the Cold War. It is outlined how growth has produced two new middles. The...
Working Paper
Spatial Convergence in China: 1952-99
The purpose of this paper is to examine the convergence process in China by taking into account the spatial interaction between factors. The paper shows that there has been a dramatic increase in the spatial dependence of China’s per capita GDP in...
Working Paper
Poverty Accounting by Factor Components
The purpose of this paper is to develop two poverty decomposition frameworks and to illustrate their applicability. A given level of poverty is broadly decomposed into an overall inequality component and an overall endowment component in terms of...
Journal Article
Global inequality
Despite the growing interest in global inequality, assessing inequality trends is a major challenge because individual data on income or consumption is not often available. Nevertheless, the periodic release of certain summary statistics of the...