World Bank

About: World Bank is a other organization based out in Washington D.C., District of Columbia, United States. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Poverty. The organization has 7813 authors who have published 21594 publications receiving 1198361 citations. The organization is also known as: World Bank, WB & The World Bank.

Shadow economies all over the world : new estimates for 162 countries from 1999 to 2007

Abstract: This paper presents estimations of the shadow economies for 162 countries, including developing, Eastern European, Central Asian, and high-income countries over the period 1999 to 2006/2007. According to the estimations, the weighted average size of the shadow economy (as a percentage of"official"gross domestic product) in Sub-Saharan Africa is 38.4 percent; in Europe and Central Asia (mostly transition countries), it is 36.5 percent, and in high-income OECD countries, it is 13.5 percent. The authors find a clear negative trend in the size of the shadow economy: The unweighted average of the 162 countries in 1999 was 34.0 percent and in 2007 31.0 percent; hence a reduction of 3 percentage points!.The driving forces of the shadow economy are an increased burden of taxation (both direct and indirect), combined with labor market regulations and the quality of public goods and services, as well as the state of the"official"economy.

The simultaneous evolution of growth and inequality

Abstract: Research on inequality and growth can be divided into two strands. One, deriving from Kuznets and Lewis, has tried to identify a mechanistic relationship between growth, or level, of income and inequality. The other has tried to find causal explanations of growth and inequality, treating each independently. In this paper, we draw from both strands to test whether growth and inequality are the joint outcomes of other variables and processes. We find that simultaneous examination of growth and inequality yields significantly different results and has different consequences for policy from previous independent studies. The empirical literature on growth and inequality can be divided into two broad strands. One, following the pioneering work of Kuznets and Lewis, is motivated by the pessimistic conjecture that the process of growth and development somehow requires increasing inequality, at least in the early stages. This has led to many efforts to identify a mechanical relationship between the level of development and inequality (Anand and Kanbur, 1993), or to determine whether faster growth requires higher or lower inequality.' The second strand has sought to identify the causal factors influencing the evolution of growth and inequality independently. This research has looked either at growth, for example, (Barro and Sala-i-Martin, 1995) or at inequality (Li et al., 1997), but has not tried to identify those factors that might simultaneously influence both growth and inequality.2 Thus, the literature that looks simultaneously at growth and inequality, descending most notably from Kuznets (1955), relates them in a mechanistic manner that ignores or minimises the role of other causal factors including policy, while the literature that incorporates other causal factors including policies looks independently at growth and inequality. Neither approach is particularly convincing from a theoretical standpoint: the evolution of growth and inequality must surely be the outcome of similar processes. In addition, neither approach is particularly useful for the policy maker, who needs to balance the impact of policies on both growth and distribution. In this paper, we investigate whether growth and inequality are simultaneously determined and if so whether or not they are subject to