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Publications (40)
Working Paper
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The interest in the level of global inequality has surged in recent years. This paper complements existing estimates of global inequality by providing the first estimates of the level of bipolarization of the global income distribution. During 1975–2010, global bipolarization declined substantially...
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– Causes and consequences
This paper re-examines the determinants and consequences of redistribution in light of improved data and methods relative to earlier literature. In particular, we use the latest version of the UNU-WIDER’s Income Inequality Database to have the best available estimates of both pre- and post...
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– How large is the effect of top incomes?
In this paper, we estimate the recent evolution of global interpersonal inequality and examine the effect of omitted top incomes on the level and direction of global inequality. We propose a methodology to estimate the truncation point of household surveys by combining information on income shares...
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Davies et al. (2008, 2011) provided the first estimates of the global distribution of wealth, using 2000 as the benchmark year. These estimates have been revised and updated since 2010, and the purpose of this paper is to explain the ways in which the estimation methodology has evolved and improved...
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– An ordinal approach
In order to understand whether a reduction in overall poverty has improved the situations of the poorest, it is crucial to distinguish them from the moderately poor population. In this paper, we explore the mechanisms to distinguish subsets of the poor in a multidimensional counting framework. We...
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This paper sets out to investigate the wellbeing of women in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). It undertakes spatial and temporal comparisons of women’s wellbeing using data from the Demographic and Health Survey and the Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey. Using the multidimensional first...
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The existing literature on optimal taxation typically assumes there exists a capacity to implement complex tax schemes, which is not necessarily the case for many developing countries. We examine the determinants of optimal redistributive policies in the context of a developing country that can only...
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– Evidence from Brazil and South Africa
Human capital models imply that both the distribution of education and returns to education affect earnings inequality. Decomposition of these ‘quantity’ and ‘price’ components have been important in understanding changes in earnings inequality in developed and developing countries. This paper...
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The paper explores the paths towards building institutional foundations for inclusive development in Sub-Saharan Africa. Viewing institutional configurations as a system of multiple equilibria, the concepts of endogenous institutions and institutional changes are used to address the question of how...
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– Cross-country and Intertemporal Comparisons
This paper evaluates fairness in educational achievements through the ordered pair (WEEOp, IEOp) whose components provide: (i) A measure of social welfare which accounts for the achievement of less-advantaged pupils and (ii) a synthetic index of inequality in educational opportunities. Students’...
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– Learning from Social Accounting Matrices
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 capture, account for a major share of the workforce...
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– New Evidence from Individual Income Tax Returns
This paper presents new evidence on the study of income mobility in Ecuador over the period 2004–11. We utilize longitudinal data of individual income tax returns to measure income mobility both at the top and at the middle of the income distribution, and we find three main empirical results. First...
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The paper proposes an analysis of the recent distributional dynamics in Uganda. This analysis is performed by endorsing an opportunity egalitarian perspective, in order to evaluate the outcome dynamics of specific groups of the population and infer the role of growth in the evolution of inequality...
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– Study on the Inequality–Development Relation Using Top Income Shares Data
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 to study slow development processes. The...
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– An Examination of the Factors Influencing Happiness among the Extreme Poor in Rural Ghana
Every person desires some level of inner fulfilment at different stages of life and this could come from a combination of several factors including material and resource acquisition and social prestige. The challenge, however, is whether happiness levels across the different social strata are the...
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– The Case of Botswana 1921-2010
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 post-colonial Botswana. We show that income...
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