Suppose that all people in the world are allocated only two characteristics: country where they live and social class within that country. Assume further that there is no migration. We show that 90 percent of variability in people's global income position (percentile in world income...

Why are social transfers from rich to poor people conducted only within countries? Is there a case for cross-country transfers? Would the basis for such transfers lie in compensation for past injustices; current economic and political interdependence between people in rich and poor countries; or...

Using household surveys from Yemen and Djibouti, the paper analyzes determinants of qat consumptions in two countries. The results confirm huge importance of qat in daily life: with between one-half (in Djibouti) and 70 percent (in Yemen) of all households reporting at least one user. But in...

Has the economic transition in Eastern Europe and the countries of the former Soviet Union been harder on pensioner households or on households containing children? Do per capita measures of welfare give a misleading picture? Much attention has been paid to the relative vulnerability of two...

We develop and implement a method for measuring the frequency of changes in power among distinct leaders and ideologically distinct parties that is comparable across political systems. We find that more frequent alternation in power is associated with the emergence of better governance in...

Using for the first time survey data from 26 post-Communist countries, covering the period 1990-2005, the paper examines correlates of unprecedented increases in inequality registered by most of these economies. We find that, after controlling for country-fixed effects and type of survey used,...

Is inequality largely the result of the Industrial Revolution? Or, were pre-industrial incomes and life expectancies as unequal as they are today? For want of sufficient data, these questions have not yet been answered. This paper infers inequality for 14 ancient, pre-industrial societies using...

The paper shows that the current view of globalization as an automatic and benign force is seriously flawed. It is mistaken because it focuses on only one, positive, face of globalization while entirely neglecting a malignant one. The two key historical episodes that are adduced by the...

The paper discusses recent world income inequality calculations by Sala-i-Martin. It shows that the two main problems with which the author had to grapple (too few data to derive countries' income distributions, and sparseness of such data in time) are not solved in a satisfactory fashion. They,...

Some economists have argued that the process of disintegration of world economy between the two World Wars has led to increased income divergence between the countries. This is in keeping with the view that economic integration leads to income convergence, and consequently that income divergence...