世界経済・社会統計 = World development indicators

We investigate whether income inequality affects subsequent growth in a cross-country sample for 1965-90, using the models of Barro (1997), Bleaney and Nishiyama (2002) and Sachs and Warner (1997), with negative results. We then investigate the evolution of income inequality over the same period and its correlation with growth. The dominating feature is inequality convergence across countries. This convergence has been significantly faster amongst developed countries. Growth does not appear to influence the evolution of inequality over time. Outline

https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/81822/1/02-28.pdf

Economic growth and income inequality

The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future. Joseph E. Stiglitz, 414 pages, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2012.I LOVE THESE GUYS''(Joseph Stiglitz) is an insanely great economist,'' so writes Paul R. Krugman, who should know. These two like to write books for the populace at large on the topic of macroeconomics. Krugman also likes to spout offon Sunday news shows like ''Meet the Press,'' and on all the cable news programs. You can see Krugman arguing with Bill O'Reilly on Meet the Press. From YouTube: ''Don't call me a liar, pal, that's what you do all the time,'' says O'Reilly; ''This is not your show, so you can't cut offmy mic,'' says Krugman. Judging by their expressions, I was glad Tim Russert (6- 3-) was there in the studio at the time to protect Krugman (5- 7-) (O'Reilly stands 6- 4-). Conservative pundits dislike both economists, but pretty much leave Stiglitz alone.Krugman makes it a point to stay out of government affairs. Stiglitz does just the opposite, and he sometimes gets burned. Stiglitz was part of Bill Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers and was Chief Economist for the World Bank. After much criticism of the way the International Monetary Fund (IMF) conducted lending to developing countries, he was pretty much fired from the World Bank. Comparing the two, you would have to say that Stiglitz is more the bleeding heart, while Krugman says that what he dislikes most is the dishonesty he sees in political-economic discourse. Both are champions of the common man.Since Stiglitz can make the very valid claim for being ''an insanely great economist,'' most everything he says in his books should be taken seriously. There are some real gems in this book. I especially like the perspective he lends to some of the more peculiar things that happened before, during, and after the financial crisis. People hear about these things in the news from some announcer who makes them sound like just more news-bites, but they are, after all, unprecedented (and largely absurd). Take ''robo-signing'' for instance (page 198).WHAT GOES FOR NEWSRobo-signing was part of what happened during the foreclosure process after the massive numbers of defaults of subprime mortgages. Big banks intentionally did not follow mandated law. Apart from ignoring debtors' rights, an ensuing mess followed. Robo-signing was nothing less than a blatant attempt at rewriting property law, and resulted in lying to the courts about the state of each property's title, literally hundreds of times. No bank officer was charged with a crime. By contrast, the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s led to 829 individual convictions and 650 prison sentences. Nowadays the big banks just pay fines as part of settlements where they admit no guilt, and it's just part of doing business.Take algorithmic or ''flash'' trading in the stock exchanges (page 164). These are buys and sales made in nanoseconds on the basis of extracting information from the patterns of prices and trades. Nothing like real information gathered through market research on an industry, or on a firm in a certain industry, backs up these trades. But traders swear that ''price discovery'' is happening this way, and that all this backs up the efficient markets model. So on May 6, 2010 stock prices plummeted to a point where the Dow Jones temporarily lost 10% of its value. There are reasons to believe that these trades ''make markets not just more volatile but also less 'informative' '' (page 166). Still, the talk on the street is all about efficient markets (echoing Alan Greenspan's failures at the Federal Reserve).Take failed privatizations. When electric power in California was liberalized and Enron manipulated prices and public power to its advantage, this was a story about the company's accounting practices, not about privatizing something that had no business being privatized. …

The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future

World Population Prospects, the 2010 Revision: Estimation and projection methodology

Maybe Greenberg hadn’t come across Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy. Raghuram G. Rajan, a professor at the University of Chicago and former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, proves the exception to Greenberg’s rule of unsatisfactory endings. Where others have delved into the personalities and perverse systems that led to the financial crisis and then summed up with a half­baked list of policy ideas, Rajan puts a premium on policy. In fact, nearly half of Fault Lines is dedicated to policy choices that Rajan believes are not only realistically achievable but likely to be quite effective. He makes a good case.

Fault Lines How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten The World Economy

Economic structuralists use a broad, systemwide approach to understanding development, and this textbook assumes a structuralist perspective in its investigation of why a host of developing countries have failed to grow at 2 percent or more since 1960. Sensitive to the wide range of factors that affect an economy's strength and stability, the authors identify the problems that have long frustrated growth in many parts of the developing world while suggesting new strategies and policies to help improve standards of living. After a survey of structuralist methods and post-World War II trends of global economic growth, the authors discuss the role that patterns in productivity, production structures, and capital accumulation play in the growth dynamics of developing countries. Next, it outlines the evolution of trade patterns and the effect of the terms of trade on economic performance, especially for countries that depend on commodity exports. The authors acknowledge the structural limits of macroeconomic policy, highlighting the negative effects of financial volatility and certain financial structures while recommending policies to better manage external shocks. These policies are then further developed through a discussion of growth and structural improvements, and are evaluated according to which policy options-macro, industrial, or commercial--best fit within different kinds of developing economies.

/pdf/growth-and-policy-in-developing-countries-a-structuralist-56rlh3fav9.pdf

Growth and Policy in Developing Countries: A Structuralist Approach

We explore four decades of cyclical and long-run dynamics in income distribution and economic activity for a panel of 13 OECD countries, as measured by the wage share and output gap. When modeled as predator–prey dynamics, economic activity in OECD countries is weakly profit-led. Convergence to a long-run equilibrium is relatively slow delaying the profit-squeeze stage for many years. Our ‘race to the bottom’ model suggests that the OECD countries have been engaged in undercutting each other’s real unit labour costs. An extension of the model shows that the long-run equilibrium has been shifting south-west towards a lower wage share. It may even be that this race has the undesirable consequence of decreasing economic activity.

/pdf/profit-maximising-goes-global-the-race-to-the-bottom-4f1v4loa9p.pdf

Profit maximising goes global: the race to the bottom

A growth model is developed for an open dual economy. The economy expands owing to a higher growth rate of labour productivity in the modern sector through the Kaldor-Verdoorn channel and higher effective demand through a Keynesian channel. The model incorporates a retardation mechanism affecting the slopes of productivity and output growth schedules as labour surplus and economies of scale diminish. A wage-led or profit-led regime and initial conditions may give rise to: de-industrialization in terms of both output and employment; a growth trap sustaining a situation of structural heterogeneity; or sustainable employment and adequate output and productivity growth.

Stagnation or transformation of a dual economy through endogenous productivity growth

We provide novel insights on the functional distribution of income in the postwar US economy, based on a Log Mean Divisia Index decomposition of the labor share by 14 sectors. We identify contributions from four components: real compensation, labor productivity, employment shares, and relative prices. The results are presented for the entire period as well as golden age (1948–1979) and neoliberal era (1979–2017), painting a detailed picture of structural changes. We find that (1) real compensation and labor productivity dominate; (2) manufacturing plays an important role in the recent decline of the labor share; (3) employment shifts toward service sectors with higher labor shares have buffered the decline; and (4) relative prices of services are increasing. We discuss these results in the context of Baumol’s and Lewis’s seminal contributions. Both theories build on the notion of coexistence of progressive and stagnant activities, which is documented in our sectoral decomposition.

/pdf/the-decline-of-the-us-labor-share-across-sectors-2eu7opeolz.pdf

Codrina Rada

Papers

Growth and Policy in Developing Countries: A Structuralist Approach

Profit maximising goes global: the race to the bottom

Stagnation or transformation of a dual economy through endogenous productivity growth

The Decline of the US Labor Share Across Sectors

Empty sources of growth accounting, and empirical replacements à la Kaldor and Goodwin with some beef