Thomas Piketty's (2014) Capital in the XXI Century aims to analyze distributions of income and wealth and their determinants, in a set of developed countries from the nineteenth century to the present. The objective is a bold one, made even more so by the fact that Piketty pursues it not only...

While the allocative efficiency of mobility is typically considered to be positive but small in the long run, the induced changes in equality may be considerable in size. In practice, however, migrants typically improve their income position in comparison to those at home, stimulate the economic...

Based on required growth rate and actual growth rate, this paper proposes a method to construct measures to indicate the probability of a country escaping the middle income trap (MIT). A second contribution of this paper is to model this probability using 1960–2015 cross-country data, focusing...

Over the last thirty years, both developed and developing countries have experienced a huge globalization of their economies, which has coincided with an increase in intra-country income inequality, both within and between skill groups. This article surveys the key mechanisms of the...

To analyse the globalization-inequality relationship, we extend the North-South HOS model by assuming (i) that the size of the South (emerging countries) increases over time and that the North (advanced countries) and the South never stand simultaneously inside the diversification cone, (ii)...

Neo-liberal globalisation has primarily entailed the liberalisation of trade and capital flows, but largely ignored the issue of labour mobility. Most literature on the political economy of globalisation likewise ignores global labour mobility. This paper first asks how globalisation affects...

The paper proposes a measure of countries' welfare based on individuals' lifetime utility and applies it to a large sample of countries in the period 1960-2000. Even though welfare inequality across countries appeared stable, the distribution dynamics points out the emergence of three clusters....

Using new comprehensive data and tools from the Global Consumption and Income Project (GCIP), covering most of the world and more than five decades, we present a portrait of the changing global distribution of consumption and income and discuss its implications for understanding inequality and...

This paper examines whether social expenditure cushions the effect of globalization on within-country inequality, and whether this relationship varies across OECD and non-OECD countries. Using several measures of social protection from OECD and the World Bank, we analyze separately the role of...

In a companion paper, “People Not Ratios: Why the Debate over Income Inequality Asks the Wrong Questions,” we argue that many inequality activists have been asking and answering the wrong questions in their quest to help the poor. Instead of analyzing the mathematical ratios between high and...