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Publications (22)
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...
Journal Article
This peer-reviewed research is available free of charge. UNU-WIDER believes that research is a global public good and supports Open Access.
– Accounting for inequality changes in Spain during the recession
The author discusses a new approach which decomposes inequality into the contributions of population groups by income sources. The author estimates a matrix with rows and columns which indicate different population groups and income sources, respectively, with each element indicating the marginal...
After 20 years of contributions to income inequality research, the World Income Inequality Database (the WIID) is getting a new expansion that will greatly strengthen knowledge on inequalities. UNU-WIDER is now working to produce a user-friendly companion database to the classic WIID that will...
Working Paper
pdf
– Comment on 'Redistribution, inequality, and growth: new evidence'
An influential paper by Berg et al., ‘Redistribution, inequality, and growth: new evidence’, uses the SWIID data to examine the impact of inequality and redistribution on growth in both developing and developed countries. It finds that while inequality is harmful for growth, redistribution does not...
Working Paper
pdf
In this paper, we use the World Income Inequality Database to assess the main trends in inequality within countries since around 1990. We cope with the heterogeneity in the original information (regarding the measure of resources, equivalence scale, etc.) by focusing on the trends rather than on the...
Working Paper
pdf
– 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...
Blog
– Explaining income distributions with ‘decompositions’
The understanding of inequality requires the analysis of changes in income distributions across countries and over time as well as the identification of its drivers. To achieve this we use different statistical tools to identify the distributional patterns and summarize the results using inequality...
Working Paper
pdf
– Accounting for inequality changes in Spain during the recession
I discuss a new approach which decomposes inequality into the contributions of population groups by income sources. I estimate a matrix with rows and columns which indicate different population groups and income sources respectively, with each element indicating the marginal change in the inequality...
Income inequality is the result of complex processes with multiple interacting driving forces but understanding those drivers in emerging economies is particularly difficult because of data and analytical challenges. While most middle-income countries produce comprehensive household surveys these...
Journal Article
This peer-reviewed research is available free of charge. UNU-WIDER believes that research is a global public good and supports Open Access.
Professor Stephen Jenkins (this issue) has conducted an extremely careful and insightful analysis of two datasets, WIID and SWIID. In this short response, we focus on his review of the WIID, maintained and published by UNU-WIDER in agreement with the World Bank. We wish to highlight at the outset...
– A Fair Deal for Consumers?
Latin American countries have now privatized a large number of their utility industries and make more use of market approaches to delivery through networks. Privatization has major consequences for efficiency, long-term growth, consumer welfare and income distribution but insufficient attention has...
Working Paper
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In spite of not being ‘public goods’ in the strict sense of the term, public provision has been a common way of supplying utilities services around the world. Among the major reasons underlying the dominant position of the public sector as the provider of infrastructure are the recognition of the...
Working Paper
pdf
– Subsidies and Service Obligations
Any infrastructure reformers concerned with social issues in a developing country need to address two problems. The first is increasing access by the poor, and the second is ensuring consumption affordability, i.e. the ability of the poor to pay for both consumption and the amortization of the...
Working Paper
pdf
The privatization of the national public utilities that took place almost a decade ago in Argentina seem to be explained by the persisting deficits of the enterprises, a general dissatisfaction with their performance and the difficulties government faced in their control. During the period of...
Working Paper
pdf
– Access to Basic Services in Bolivia
This paper analyses the privatization of utilities in Bolivia, detailing the particularities of the capitalization mechanism which was used for this purpose. The analysis suggests that capitalization and regulation, and the liberalization of the utilities sector more generally, succeeded in...
Working Paper
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Relying on a general equilibrium model of Argentina’s economy calibrated for 1993 and internalizing all productivity and scale gains achieved up to 1999, this paper isolates the distributional effects of utilities reform from the impact of other reforms taking place in the country during the 1990s...
Displaying 16 of 22 results