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Publications (34)
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...
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– 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...
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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...
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– 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...
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– 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...
Blog
Racial wage inequality and discrimination have pervaded South African society for centuries. Apartheid legislation cemented these disparities by institutionalizing white job reservation and many other unfair practices. While racial wage gaps started to decline towards the end of apartheid in 1994...
– The case of the Assam insurgency
Girls in India face many challenges. From the moment they are conceived, they are less likely to be born as compared to boys. This presence of “missing girls” appears to be linked to access to ultrasound technology. Moreover, girls also get breastfed for a shorter duration and get fewer childcare...
The Center for American Progress estimates the costs of discrimination at US$64 billion per year, or roughly 2 million annually displaced American workers (Burns, 2012). Discrimination is clearly costly. It is also, almost universally, a unique and puzzling issue. This blog looks at two recent WIDER...
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– An analysis of attitudes towards redistribution across groups in Africa
Inequalities between ethnic or racial groups, defined as horizontal inequalities, are pervasive and persistent. They persist due to cumulative and reinforcing inequalities arising from unequal access to different types of capital. Affirmative action policies can provide promising opportunities for...
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– Comparative evidence from Ethiopia, India, Peru, and Vietnam
We investigate whether there are racial and ethnic disparities in children’s education in Ethiopia, India, Peru, and Vietnam. We find that in all the four countries, and especially in Vietnam, children from small ethnic groups have lower education attainment and cognitive ability. The gap in...
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In India, caste shapes access to a variety of resources and outcomes mainly through its influence on inter-generational prosperity, but also the linked phenomenon of discrimination. This paper examines whether caste-based differences in access to formal agricultural loans reflect discrimination in...
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Research on caste-based inequalities in India has generally focused on differences between large categories such as the Scheduled Castes, the Scheduled Tribes, and the remainder of the population. We contribute to the literature on horizontal inequalities in India by looking within these groupings...
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We evaluate the effectiveness of a post-conflict development programme on maternal health-care utilization in the Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh. Our work varies from conventional impact evaluation studies because of the inclusion of two post-conflict psychosocial risks: the household’s actual...
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The market environment in which discriminatory firms operate may be a relevant determinant of their extent of discrimination. In this paper we aim at analysing the effect of local labour market conditions on a firm’s decision to discriminate. We use a direct measure of discrimination using online...
Displaying 16 of 34 results