This paper explores the economic impacts of two related tracks of China's expected transformation-economic slowdown and rebalancing away from investment toward consumption-and estimates the spillovers for the rest of the world, with a special focus on Sub-Saharan African countries. The paper...

In the last decades, Brazil experienced a historical decline in its wage inequality level, particularly in the first decade of the 21^st century. This paper reviews the literature that attempted to explain the observed pattern. It considers mechanisms related to the supply and demand for labor,...

The goals of ending extreme poverty by 2030 and working toward a more equal distribution of income are prominent in international development and agreed upon in the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals 1 and 10. Using data from 164 countries comprising 97 percent of the world's...

This paper studies future poverty, inequality, and shared prosperity outcomes using a panel data set with 150 countries over 1980-2014. The findings suggest that global extreme poverty will decrease in absolute and relative terms in the period 2015-2030. However, absolute poverty is likely to...

The Russian Federation offers the unique example of a leading centrally planned economy swiftly transforming itself into a market-oriented economy. This paper offers a comprehensive study of inequality and mobility patterns for Russia, using multiple rounds of the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring...

Over the last two decades, Mexico has experienced macroeconomic stability, an open trade regime, and substantial progress in education. Yet average workers' earnings have stagnated, and earnings of those with higher schooling have fallen, compressing the earnings distribution and lowering the...

This paper exploits a novel municipal-level data set to explore patterns of convergence in income and poverty in Mexico during 1992-2014. The paper finds that, despite a context of overall stagnant economic growth and poverty reduction, there is evidence of income and poverty convergence at the...

How much an economy should invest in its physical infrastructure is a crucial question being asked by policy makers from developing countries where financial resources for economic development are limited. This paper aims to address this question by bringing insights from the literature that...

This paper documents an inverse U-shape in the evolution of wage inequality in Latin America since 1995, with a sharp reduction starting in 2002. The Gini coefficient of wages increased from 42 to 44 between 1995 and 2002 and declined to 39 by 2015. Between 2002 and 2015, the 90/10 log hourly...

An extensive literature on poverty traps suggests that high levels of poverty deter growth. However, a seemingly basic implication of the underlying theoretical models, namely that countries suffering from higher levels of poverty should grow less rapidly, has remained untested. A parallel...