https://hceconomics.uchicago.edu/sites/default/files/file_uploads/2_HO_Corak_2013_Income-Inequality-JEP-HO_STATIC_2016-01-02a_jld.pdf

Extract from \Income Inequality, Equality of Opportunity, and Intergenerational Mobility"

The report, published by the Earth Institute and co-edited by the institute’s director, Jeffrey Sachs, reflects a new worldwide demand for more attention to happiness and absence of misery as criteria for government policy. It reviews the state of happiness in the world today and shows how the new science of happiness explains personal and national variations in happiness.

World happiness report

Finance and income inequality: A review and new evidence

Are mass violence and catastrophes the only forces that can seriously decrease economic inequality? To judge by thousands of years of history, the answer is yes. Tracing the global history of inequality from the Stone Age to today, Walter Scheidel shows that it never dies peacefully. The Great Leveler is the first book to chart the crucial role of violent shocks in reducing inequality over the full sweep of human history around the world. The "Four Horsemen" of leveling-mass-mobilization warfare, transformative revolutions, state collapse, and catastrophic plagues-have repeatedly destroyed the fortunes of the rich. Today, the violence that reduced inequality in the past seems to have diminished, and that is a good thing. But it casts serious doubt on the prospects for a more equal future. An essential contribution to the debate about inequality, The Great Leveler provides important new insights about why inequality is so persistent-and why it is unlikely to decline anytime soon.

The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century

In recent years, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has re-emerged as a central actor in global economic governance. Its rhetoric and policies suggest that the organization has radically changed the ways in which it offers financial assistance to countries in economic trouble. We revisit two long-standing controversies: Has the policy content of IMF programmes evolved to allow for more policy space? Do these programmes now allow for the protection of labour and social policies? We collected relevant archival material on the IMF's lending operations and identified all policy conditionality in IMF loan agreements between 1985 and 2014, extracting 55,465 individual conditions across 131 countries in total. We find little evidence of a fundamental transformation of IMF conditionality. The organization's post-2008 programmes reincorporated many of the mandated reforms that the organization claims to no longer advocate and the number of conditions has been increasing. We also find that policies intro...

/pdf/imf-conditionality-and-development-policy-space-1985-2014-3tm16aloyr.pdf

IMF conditionality and development policy space, 1985–2014

This paper analyzes the extent of income inequality from a global perspective, its drivers, and what to do about it. The drivers of inequality vary widely amongst countries, with some common drivers being the skill premium associated with technical change and globalization, weakening protection for labor, and lack of financial inclusion in developing countries. We find that increasing the income share of the poor and the middle class actually increases growth while a rising income share of the top 20 percent results in lower growthâthat is, when the rich get richer, benefits do not trickle down. This suggests that policies need to be country specific but should focus on raising the income share of the poor, and ensuring there is no hollowing out of the middle class. To tackle inequality, financial inclusion is imperative in emerging and developing countries while in advanced economies, policies should focus on raising human capital and skills and making tax systems more progressive.

/pdf/causes-and-consequences-of-income-inequality-a-global-4j77sxdd1o.pdf

Causes and Consequences of Income Inequality : A Global Perspective

This paper analyzes the extent of income inequality from a global perspective, its drivers, and what to do about it. The drivers of inequality vary widely amongst countries, with some common drivers being the skill premium associated with technical change and globalization, weakening protection for labor, and lack of financial inclusion in developing countries. We find that increasing the income share of the poor and the middle class actually increases growth while a rising income share of the top 20 percent results in lower growth—that is, when the rich get richer, benefits do not trickle down. This suggests that policies need to be country specific but should focus on raising the income share of the poor, and ensuring there is no hollowing out of the middle class. To tackle inequality, financial inclusion is imperative in emerging and developing countries while in advanced economies, policies should focus on raising human capital and skills and making tax systems more progressive.

Causes and Consequences of Income Inequality; A Global Perspective

https://www.imf.org/-/media/Websites/IMF/imported-full-text-pdf/external/pubs/ft/sdn/2015/_sdn1513.ashx

Learning, political attitudes and crises: Lessons from transition countries

We estimate the impact of the recent economic crisis on support for democracy and a free market economy in 30 post transition countries and five western European countries. Political values are cyclical and reflect a learning process. Support for the market and democracy has decreased between 2006 and 2010 in countries that were hit the hardest and that were the most advanced on the path to liberal reform, and notably new EU members. By contrast, it has increased in the CIS. This last result is driven by the young and unemployed. Although individual exposure to the crisis is associated with lower average support to democracy and markets, it leads these segments of the population, which were most excluded from the political-economic system in place to demand more liberal reforms in countries with corrupt institutions and that lag behind in terms of economic and political reform. We rely on individual level, within-country variation and on the use of a large set of individual controls in order to identify the causal effect of the economic crisis on political attitudes.

/pdf/learning-political-attitudes-and-the-crisis-in-transition-1djs889nup.pdf

Frantisek Ricka

Papers

Causes and Consequences of Income Inequality : A Global Perspective

Causes and Consequences of Income Inequality; A Global Perspective

Causes and Consequences of Income Inequality : A Global Perspective

Learning, political attitudes and crises: Lessons from transition countries

Learning, Political Attitudes and the Crisis in Transition Countries