Suchergebnisse

Income inequality has been on the rise in many industrialised countries since around the 1980's. In Sweden the increase of income inequality has been particularly large. This in spite of Sweden's extensive redistribution system and public policy that prioritize equality among its population. This paper investigates a potential factor for the rise in inequality that is yet fairly unexplored, namely immigration. As inequality has increased in Sweden, so has also immigration. Sweden experienced large refugee inflows after the 1970's, the largest flow consisting of circa 100 000 Yugoslavs during the Bosnian war. This study provides indications on what way immigration shapes the income distribution and lays the ground for prospective studies. Results show that the inflow of new migrants during the early 1990's in Sweden raises income inequality and it is almost entirely due to increased dispersion in the lower tail of the income distribution.

This thesis contains three essays on income inequality. The underlying theme is to investigate the relationship of income inequality with political instability, economic growth, and financial development. To this end, the first study aims to explore the relationship of income inequality with political instability. Motivated by the observation that politically unstable countries tend to have wide income gaps, the study explores the possibility that major source of political instability is income inequality, which can be traced back to the history of early development across the globe. Using data for 95 countries, the estimates provide support for the notion that before 1500 CE early development of our ancestors, and after 1500 CE colonization, and evolution of institutions can explain today's income inequality, which subsequently affects political stability of a country. Irrespective of the subsamples used, the results confirm highly significant impact of unequal income distribution on political instability. The second study investigates the endogeneity between income inequality and economic growth, which seems to be impregnable in the literature. Motivated by Spolaore and Wacziarg's (2009) influential idea that genetic distance of population between countries puts barrier to the diffusion of development, this work constructs weighted average growth of other countries as instruments for economic growth that can explain inequality across the countries. The weights come from genetic and geographic distances between two countries. Income growth per capita is instrumented to find growth's impact on the top income shares first, and then the residuals of the regression are used as instruments for the top income shares to identify the net impact of top income shares on economic growth in the subsequent regressions. Using top income data of fourteen OECD countries for around hundred years, the estimates provide support to the view that growth reduces top income shares; however, top income shares in turn enhances economic growth. The third study explores the possibility of financial development as a major determinant of top income shares in the OECD countries. In a century long panel of time series data of top income shares and financial development, the work attempts to capture the impact of financial development on the income distribution of the top income strata. Couple of dynamic models has been used to check the robustness of our hypothesis in favour of financial development as a major source of rise in the top income shares. The results show that a one standard deviation rise in financial development, measured by private credit-GDP ratio, is associated with an increase of the top 1% income shares by around 0.3 standard deviation of its own. The effects are also robust to the other measures of top income shares.

The paper considered the question of whether the distribution of disposable income per capita in the Polish voivodships (provinces) is similar. To study this, the authors put appropriate statistical hypotheses and verified using the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test. Conducting this test allowed them to conclude that there are no grounds to assert that the hypothesis of identical distributions of disposable income per capita is true. The authors determined only the degree of similarity of individual schedules and on this basis, divided the provinces into four homogeneous classes. Thanks to the Wroclaw taxonomy there has been shown that the conduct of the said division results in separation of the three one-piece groups, and one group of thirteen provinces.

"Income Inequality and Economic Development" published on by Oxford University Press.