Empowerment of the poor does not necessarily make them better off – or make the non-poor worse off. In some cases, empowerment may be inefficient, i.e. a negative-sum game. In other cases, it is a zero-sum game, as the poor can benefit only at the expense of someone else. But in many cases, it...

Zak & Knack (2001) demonstrate that interpersonal trust substantially impacts economic growth, and that sufficient interpersonal trust is necessary for economic development. To investigate the ability of policy-makers to affect trust levels, this paper builds a formal model characterizing public...

We reconstruct a dataset used by Persson and Tabellini (AER, 1994) to test the robustness of their finding that inequality reduces income growth, but only in democracies. We find that their result is highly sensitive to the use of data sources on both democracy and inequality. When we substitute...

There are few studies of the social and economic consequences of remittances from migrant workers on poverty and inequality in their home country until recently, especially in Haiti. The known amount of remittances sent to Haiti by the Haitian diaspora has surpassed one billion U.S. dollars in...

In most OECD countries the gap between rich and poor has widened over the past decades. This paper analyzes whether and to what extent taxes and social transfers have contributed to this trend. Has the redistributive power of different social programs changed over time? The paper contributes to...

For several decades, the international community has aspired to integrate the social, economic and environmental dimensions of sustainability. Yet, no country has achieved the patterns of consumption and production that could sustain global prosperity in the coming decades. Thus, with the...

The relationship between economic development and income inequality is not neutral vis-à-vis the role of the financial system in responding to the needs of different categories of agents. Indeed, as shown by the literature of the persistent inequality (e.g. Banarjee and Newman, 1993; Piketty,...

This paper measures impact of agricultural land on household income and consumption expenditure, and subsequently assesses impact of agricultural land on poverty and inequality in rural Vietnam. It is found that agricultural land increases per capita consumption expenditure and income of the...

The principal contribution of this article is that it provides evidence of recent trends of inequality in Guyana, but the article goes beyond this and describes the evolution of inequality since 1974 to 2013. This is done within a Kaleckian framework to derive profit and wage rates, since recent...

The potential impacts of multilateral trade liberalisation on developing countries are the subject of numerous controversies. One particular concern is that Brazil, a major agricultural exporter and a country with one of the world’s most unequal income distributions, will reap a substantial...