Book Chapter
Setting the scene

Inequality has emerged as a key development challenge. It holds implications for economic growth and redistribution, and translates into power asymmetries that can endanger human rights, create conflict, and embed social exclusion and chronic poverty. 

For these reasons, it underpins intense public and academic debates and has become a dominant policy concern within many countries and in all multilateral agencies. It is at the core of the seventeen goals of the UN’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. 

This chapter introduces a volume that contributes to this important discussion by bringing together assessments of the measurement and analysis of global inequality by leading inequality scholars with a comprehensive view of inequality trends in five of the world’s largest developing countries — Brazil, China, India, Mexico, South Africa. 

Understanding inequalities in these economies remains challenging, but is of great value in coming to grips with the contemporary global inequalities, detailed in other chapters.