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Publications (33)
Working Paper
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– The contribution of the UNU-WIDER World Income Inequality Database initiative
Globally, there are several initiatives being undertaken to ensure the availability of information across countries that can be used to analyse the inequality phenomenon in and among countries. The data are easily accessible for use in comparative research on inequality across regions and countries...
Working Paper
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– ACEIR research and the WIID
Work done by the African Centre of Excellence for Inequality Research (ACEIR) has documented the many-faceted nature of inequality in Ghana, Kenya, and South Africa. Conventionally measured inequality ranges from moderate (in Ghana) to extremely high (in South Africa). Trying to tell one coherent...
Working Paper
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– Ghana case study
Over the years, money-metric measures of inequality such as the Gini coefficient and the Palma Ratio, as frequently used in Ghana, have become useful in providing quantitative measures of welfare distribution that enable a better understanding of the extent and nature of inequality. From these...
Working Paper
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A substantial amount of research has been conducted examining inequality in South Africa using multiple data sources. We provide an overview of this research in this paper. Furthermore, we use nationally representative survey data to estimate income and consumption inequality in South Africa between...
Many countries today experience increasing or persistent income inequality, a major concern for citizens and politicians alike. This concern is justified; as some individuals get richer, most people’s real incomes stagnate. Widening income inequality brings challenges to a nation’s development...
Working Paper
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In this paper we explore the links between international migration and income inequality. After presenting a simple model which considers the role of income distribution in individual decisions to migrate, we estimate a set of models on the determinants of yearly bilateral migration from a very...
Working Paper
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– Insights from wildfires across the globe
Natural disasters cause economic damages and may exacerbate disparities in income distribution among countries across the globe. This paper employs satellite data on real-time active fire locations to evaluate the short-term impact of forest fires on economic inequality around the world. Using quasi...
Book Chapter
– An integrated approach
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 inequality around the globe. To address this research...
Working Paper
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– A worldwide perspective
This paper investigates the importance of accounting for the profile of inequality in the analysis of institutional trust. Drawing on individual data from 82 countries around the world over the 1981–2021 period, it sheds light on the potential limitations of exploring the impact of the income...
Working Paper
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– New evidence at the world level
This paper investigates the evolution of the productive structure around the world and the role it plays in the difference in inequality levels, using panel data for the period from 1995 to 2018. We approximate a country’s productive structure through the Economic Complexity Index. Our results...
Working Paper
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The notion of multidimensional inequality has attracted attention lately, but mostly as a micro approach to measuring inequality in well-being in a more complete way. We argue that considering inequality in a multidimensional way from a macro perspective is useful for a better understanding of the...
Working Paper
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– Command over tradables, non-tradables, and people
This paper analyses elite incomes around the world, and how international comparisons of elite incomes vary depending on the exchange rate and income concept used. It is well known that between-country income inequality is higher using market exchange rates than purchasing power parity (PPP)...
Blog
Early in October 2022, international and Colombian researchers gathered together for three days at the UNIANDES campus, located at the foot of the impressive Monserrate in Bogotá, Colombia. They were there to discuss their latest advances in inequality research. This was the second WIDER Development...
Blog
For several decades, UNU-WIDER has actively worked on pathfinding and groundbreaking research on inequalities. We host one of the most extensive collections of income inequality statistics in the world freely available and updated annually. I have written previously about how the institute was...
Working Paper
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We examine inequality convergence over the past three decades and ask if environmentally related impacts on health, and their effect on human capital, are responsible for the slow rate of inequality reduction in countries. Though higher initial incidence of environmentally related impacts on health...
Working Paper
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– The role of different parts of the income distribution
In this paper we reassess the relationship between inequality and human development, focusing on the differential effect associated with the concentration of national income at different parts of the income distribution. To do so, we rely on a large global panel of countries over the last decades...
Displaying 16 of 33 results