Over the past 20 years, aggregate measures of global inequality have changed little even if significant structural changes have been observed. High growth rates of China and India lifted millions out of poverty, while the stagnation in many African countries caused them to fall behind. Using the...

Agriculture's share in an economy invariably declines as per capita income rises and as the economy develops. The literature on its causes has focused on the relative price effects arising from demand factors--especially Engel's Law (that the proportion of income spent on food declines as...

The authors examine the growth and convergence of total factor productivity in agriculture and manufacturing in a large sample of countries spanning many levels of development over the period 1967-1992. There is a widely held but rarely tested view that the rate of growth in agricultural...

The fact that raising taxes can increase taxed labor supply through income effects is frequently used to justify much lower measures of the marginal welfare cost of taxes and greater public good provision than indicated by traditional, compensated analyses. The authors confirm that this...

To what extent has Sub-Saharan Africa's slow economic growth over the past five decades been due to price and trade policies that discouraged production of agricultural relative to non-agricultural tradables? This paper uses a new set of estimates of policy induced distortions to relative...

This paper critically reviews the literature on finance and inequality, highlighting substantive gaps in the literature. Finance plays a crucial role in most theories of persistent inequality. Unsurprisingly, therefore, economic theory provides a rich set of predictions concerning both the...

Over the past decade (2003-12), Latin America has experienced strong income growth and a notable reduction in income inequality, with the region's Gini coefficient falling from 55.6 to 51.8. Previous studies have warned about the sustainability of such a decline, and this paper presents evidence...

This volume presents a collection of studies on the dynamics of income inequality based on micro data. Using a simple but powerful empirical methodology, the authors analyze the roles of prices, occupational choice, and educational choice in accounting for household income and its contribution...

As usual in this series, Chapter 1 reviews the configuration of global risks and assesses the outstanding short term opportunities and challenges facing the LAC region. We document the significant slowdown in economic activity across the region, and explore the possibility of this being the...

This paper advances research on inequality with unique, new data on income distribution in 61 countries, including 20 Latin American countries, to explore the effects of political parties on redistribution. First, consistent with a central -- but still contested -- assumption of the political...