Suchergebnisse

The idea that a Study of Social and Economic Inequalities (SSEI) should be undertaken in Australia was first proposed in 1988 by the then Minister for Social Security, Brian Howe. The main focus of the Study is to shed new light on various dimensions of inequality in Australia - both economic and social - and to investigate the factors causing them. The research involves the analysis of existing data rather than the collection of new data, a task which has been facilitated by the public availability of unit record and other data collected by the Australian Bureau of Statistics. By adopting an empirical approach, the study will inform the development of government policies directed at alleviating those forms of inequality requiring policy action. Some of the work is being conducted in an international comparative context, thus providing a framework in which we in Australia can learn from experience in other countries where appropriate. The five main themes of the Study are: Money Income Inequality, Poverty and Living Standards in Australia; Non-Monetary Benefits and Income Inequality; Factors Contributing to Inequalities in Monetary Income; Economic Inequality over the Family Life Cycle; and International Dimensions of Inequality and Redistribution. As Directors of the Study, one of our first tasks was to bring together researchers associated with the Study and with other organisations in Australia in order to review what is currently known about inequality in Australia. To this end, a two day Conference was held at the University of New South Wales in July 1991. This report contains some of the papers presented at that Conference, organised under the theme: 'Some Factors Causing Inequality'. The other main theme 'Government and Redistribution', is covered in SSEI Monograph No. 1. Together these reports represent an overview of the current state of knowledge and point to areas where further research is required. Some of that research will be conducted as part of the Study and will be reported on in due course.

Since Aristotle, who observed that great economic inequality leads the wealthy to seek a share of power matching their share of resources and so to subvert democratic government, scholars of politics have theorized that the proper functioning of a democracy depends on a relatively equal distribution of economic resources. Inequality, though, has been rising in the nearly all of the world's rich and upper-middle-income democracies since the at least the mid-1980s, and in many countries this trend began in the early 1970s. Examining individual behavior in twenty-four countries at multiple points in time, this paper investigates whether increases in economic inequality have had a negative effect on the functioning of democracy, focusing specifically on citizens' political engagement. It finds that contexts of greater income inequality reduce interest in politics, views of government responsiveness, and participation in elections.

The idea that a Study of Social and Economic Inequalities (SSEI) should be undertaken in Australia was first proposed in 1988 by the then Minister for Social Security, Brian Howe. The main focus of the Study is to shed new light on various dimensions of inequality in Australia - both economic and social - and to investigate the factors causing them. The research involves the analysis of existing data rather than the collection of new data, a task which has been facilitated by the public availability of unit record and other data collected by the Australian Bureau of Statistics. By adopting an empirical approach, the study will inform the development of government policies directed at alleviating those forms of inequality requiring policy action. Some of the work is being conducted in an international comparative context, thus providing a framework in which we in Australia can learn from experience in other countries where appropriate. The five main themes of the Study are: Money Income Inequality, Poverty and Living Standards in Australia; Non-Monetary Benefits and Income Inequality; Factors Contributing to Inequalities in Monetary Income; Economic Inequality over the Family Life Cycle; and International Dimensions of Inequality and Redistribution. As Directors of the Study, one of our first tasks was to bring together researchers associated with the Study and with other organisations in Australia in order to review what is currently known about inequality in Australia. To this end, a two day Conference was held at the University of New South Wales in July 1991. This report contains some of the papers presented at that Conference, organised under the theme: 'Government and Redistribution'. The other main theme 'Some Factors Causing Inequality', is covered in SSEI Monograph No. 2. Together these reports represent an overview of the current state of knowledge and point to areas where further research is required. Some of that research will be conducted as part of the Study and will be reported on in due course.

This paper describes tests of several hypotheses put forward in the literature on the significance of education as a determinant of economic development. It is shown that the generally positive impact of education on economic development is severely impaired by 'educational imbalance' in the case of tertiary education, whereas economic inequality and repression of political rights primarily seem to reduce the social returns of the lower educational levels.

This article uses data from the 1998 European Union Household Panel to study economic inequality in Spain. It reports data on the Spanish distributions of income, labor income, and capital income, and on related features of inequality, such as age, employment status, educational attainment, and marital status. It also reports data on the income mobility of Spanish households. We find that income, earnings, and, very especially, capital income are very unequally distributed in Spain.

This article compares recent economic inequality in industrialized nations, largely those belonging to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). This research finds the United States has the highest overall level of inequality of any rich OECD nation in the mid-1990s. It also finds that the increases in the dispersion of total household income in the United States have been as large as, or larger than, those experienced elsewhere between 1979 and 2000, despite the fact that the US began the period with the highest level of inequality. The authors also look at the trend in inequality within the United States using various series from published and unpublished data to examine exactly how US inequality changed over the past several decades. Next, the authors examine the effects of government policies and social spending efforts on inequality, finding that the United States has lesser effects than any other rich nation, and that both low spending and low wages have a great impact on the final income distribution, especially among the non-elderly. The authors then are in a position to answer a number of questions. What role does policy; therefore, play in the final determination of income inequality? Can these differences be explained by demography (more single parents; more immigrants; or more elders?) or can they be attributed to American institutions and lack of spending effort on behalf of low-income families? And finally, does inequality of before tax and benefit income itself have anything to do with low social spending?

This paper examines the level and distribution of equivalent after tax, after transfer money income in Canada, the USA, the UK, Germany and Sweden using micro-data from the Luxembourg Income Study from 1969/70 to 1994/95. It concentrates on inequality within and between birth cohorts. At any point in time, less than 11% of aggregate income inequality is due to intergenerational inequality, but the experience of different birth cohorts over the period has varied widely across countries. The five countries studied differ in the trends observed in aggregate income, poverty, polarization and income inequality. In the USA and the UK, the incomes of the top decile of each cohort have risen dramatically, but the incomes of the bottom quintile have stagnated. In Canada and Sweden both the top and bottom deciles of each cohort have experienced similar trends. Germany is an intermediate case. Poverty trends are extremely sensitive to the distribution of the gains from growth - if only 10% of the income gains of the top decile of the UK and the USA had been transferred to the bottom decile, poverty in both countries in 1994/95 would have been substantially lower than in 1979, instead of substantially higher. The basic lesson is the diversity of income distribution trends to be observed in international data - and the consequent diversity of implications for political economy.

This study tests two propositions from Navarro's critique of the social capital literature: that social capital's importance has been exaggerated and that class-related political factors, absent from social epidemiology and public health, might be key determinants of population health. The authors estimate cross-sectional associations between economic inequality, working-class power, and social capital and life expectancy, self-rated health, low birth weight, and age- and cause-specific mortality in 16 wealthy countries. Of all the health outcomes, the five variables related to birth and infant survival and nonintentional injuries had the most consistent association with economic inequality and working-class power (in particular with strength of the welfare state) and, less so, with social capital indicators. Rates of low birth weight and infant deaths from all causes were lower in countries with more �쐋eft�� (e.g., socialist, social democratic, labor) votes, more left members of parliament, more years of social democratic government, more women in government, and various indicators of strength of the welfare state, as well as low economic inequality, as measured in a variety of ways. Similar associations were observed for injury mortality, underscoring the crucial role of unions and labor parties in promoting workplace safety. Overall, social capital shows weaker associations with population health indicators than do economic inequality and working-class power. The popularity of social capital and exclusion of class-related political and welfare state indicators does not seem to be justified on empirical grounds. ; open

Dottorato di Ricerca in Statistica Applicata alle Scienze Economiche e Sociali ; Inequality and poverty are two crucial aspects of the economy of a country, and need careful study to allow the government to design suitable policies, in order to fight these phenomena and increase the welfare of the citizens. One of the main issues for the policy planner is to be able to distinguish the transitory from the permanent changes in the welfare level. In fact, the aim of long-term policies, such as training courses, is to tackle and solve problems that have a permanent impact on the welfare of the households. On the other hand, short-term policies like unemployment benefits focus on the solution of transitory conditions, and make sense only if the poverty spell is temporary, in the presence of liquidity constraints, as pointed out in Browning and Crossley (1999a,b) and Gruber (1997). The importance of the distinction of the transitory and permanent components of inequality has been underlined in several recent studies on the United Kingdom and the United States of America. In particular, Blundell and Preston (1998) propose a model for the identification of the two aspects through the joint use of information on income and consumption. In this thesis we follow the same line of research, adapting the models used there to the peculiarities of Italian data, and present an analysis of inequality in its two components. We then apply similar arguments to the study of poverty, and derive new models for the identification of its transitory and permanent aspects. This approach is new to the Italian literature for two reasons. First of all, the pre¬vious studies on the distribution of income and consumption were mainly descriptive, while here we offer a formalised approach that develops - from the economic theory of consumer's behaviour - econometric models for estimation and testing. The other new aspect of this study is the identification and estimation of the transitory and per¬manent components of inequality and poverty, since all the previous literature focused on information on either income or consumption, but never made joint use of the two variables, therefore failing to identify the two components. The study is organised as follows. The first Chapter presents an overview of the inequality and poverty conditions in Italy as pictured in the studies currently available. It then introduces some more formalised approaches that we could use for our analyses, and motivates the choice we made. Several data issues arise due to the characteristics of the surveys available for our study. They are presented and discussed in the second Chapter, together with the first descriptive results. Further data issues are discussed in the Appendix. Chapter 3 introduces the economic theory of consumer's behaviour that will serve as a framework for the derivation of the econometric estimation and testing procedures. The following two Chapters present the specific models and the empirical results on inequality and poverty, respectively. The econometric model for the study of inequality follows the line of the studies on the UK and the US that we mentioned earlier, and makes joint use of income and consumption in order to separate the permanent and transitory components of inequality. The study of poverty, instead, has been inspired by the literature on measurement errors, and in particular by the paper Chesher and Schluter (1999) on measurement errors in the measurement of welfare. Measurement error techniques are applied to the income and consumption processes of our economic model, after observing that the corresponding innovations have the same properties as classical measurement errors. Chapter 6 summarises and discusses the methods presented and the empirical find¬ings, and identifies issues that would deserve further development. This study benefited from useful discussion with many people. I would like to thank in particular Ramses Abul-Naga, Massimo Baldini, Richard Blundell, Paolo Bosi, Claudio Ceccarelli, Bruno Cheli, Andrew Chesher, Giovanni D'Alessio, Ian Pre¬ston, Enrico Rettore, Jacques Silber, Ugo Trivellato and Guglielmo Weber; participants to conferences in Siena and Geneva, and seminars in Padova provided interesting com¬ments and suggestions. Thanks also go to ISTAT and Bank of Italy for availability of data. Financial support from MURST and from CNR & MURST within the projects 'Occupazione e disoccupazione in Italia: misura ed analisi dei comportamenti' and Tensions, Savings and Portfolio Choices' is gratefully acknowledged. This research was also sponsored by the ISTAT work-group exploring the feasibility of constructing an integrated data bank on household consumption and income from ISTAT and Bank of Italy survey information. However, the views expressed in this study, as well as the responsibility for any errors, are entirely mine. ; La disuguaglianza económica e la povertà sono due importanti aspetti dell'economia di un paese, e richiedono uno studio accurato per permettere al governo di programmare politiche adatte a combatiere questi fenomeni e aumentare il benessere dei cittadini. Una delle principali questioni per chi pianifica le politiche economiche e fiscali è la capacita di distinguere i cambiamenti transitori da quelli permanenti nel livello di benessere. Infatti, lo scopo delle politiche di lungo termine, come i corsi di formazione, è quello di affrontare e risolvere problemi che hanno un impatto permanente sul be¬nessere delle famiglie. D'altra parte le politiche di breve termine come i sussidi di disoccupazione mirano alia soluzione di condizioni transitorie, e hanno senso solo se l'episodio di povertà è temporáneo, in presenza di vincoli di liquidité, come messo in luce in Browning e Crossley (1999a,b) e in Gruber (1997). L'importanza della distinzione tra le componenti transitorie e permanenti della disuguaglianza è stata sottolineata in diversi studi recenti nel Regno Unito e negli Stati Uniti d'America. In particolare Blundell e Preston (1998) propongono un mo-dello per l'identificazione dei due aspetti mediante Tuso congiunto di informazioni sui redditi e sui consumi. In questa tesi seguiamo la stessa linea di ricerca, adattando i loro modelli alie caratteristiche particolari dei dati italiani, e presentiamo un'analisi della disuguaglianza nelle sue due componenti. Usiamo poi argomentazioni simili per studiare la povertà, e ricaviamo nuovi modelli per identificare i suoi aspetti transitori e permanenti. L'approccio da noi seguito è nuovo nella letteratura italiana, per due ragioni. In primo luogo i precedenti studi sulla distribuzione di redditi e consumi sonó essenzial-mente di natura descrittiva, mentre qui offriamo un approccio formalizzato che sviluppa - dalla teoria económica del comportamento del consumatore - modelli econometrici per la stima e la verifica d'ipotesi. II secondo aspetto nuovo di questo studio consiste nella identificazione e nella stima delle componenti transitorie e permanenti della di¬suguaglianza e della povertà, mentre tutti i lavori precedenti hanno posto l'attenzioneo solo sui redditi o solo sui consumí, senza mai fare uso congiunto delle due variabili, non riuscendo quindi ad identificare le due componenti. La tesi é organizzata come segué. II primo capitolo presenta una panorámica delle condizioni di disuguaglianza e povertá in Italia, cosi come sonó descritte negli studi precedenti. Esso poi introduce alcuni approcci piú formalizzati da usare nelle nostre analisi, motivando inoltre le scelte fatte. Diverse questioni riguardanti i dati sorgono per via delle caratteristiche delle indagini campionarie disponibili per il nostro studio; esse sonó preséntate e discusse nel secon-do capitolo, insieme ai primi risultati descrittivi. Ulteriori questioni sui dati vengono discusse nell'appendice. II Capitolo 3 espone la teoria económica del comportamento del consumatore, che servirá come base per ricavare le procedure econometriche di stima e test. due capitoli seguenti contengono i modelli specifici e i risultati empirici, rispet-tivamente su disuguaglianza e povertá. II modello econometrico per lo studio della disuguaglianza segué la linea degli studi nel Regno Unito e negli USA citati prima, e fa uso congiunto di redditi e consumi alio scopo di separare le componenti permanente e transitoria della disuguaglianza. Invece lo studio della povertá si ispira alia letteratura sugli errori di misura, ed in particolare all'articolo di Chesher e Schluter (1999) sugli errori di misura nella misurazione del benessere. Tecniche di errori di misura vengono applicate ai processi stocastici di redditi e consumi del nostro modello económico, dopo aver osservato che le innovazioni corrispondenti hanno le stesse proprietá degli errori di misura classici. Capitolo 6 riassume e discute i metodi presentati e i risultati empirici, e individua argomenti che potrebbero avere ulteriori sviluppi. Questo studio ha beneficiato di utili scambi di idee con diverse persone. In partico¬lare vorrei ringraziare Ramses Abul-Naga, Massimo Baldini, Richard Blundell, Paolo Bosi, Claudio Ceccarelli, Bruno Cheli, Andrew Chesher, Giovanni D'Alessio, Ian Pre¬sten, Enrico Rettore, Jacques Silber, Ugo Trivellato e Guglielmo Weber; i partecipanti a convegni a Siena e a Ginevra, e a seminari a Padova hanno offerto inetressanti com-menti e suggerimenti. I miei ringraziamenti vanno anche all'ISTAT e alia Banca d'Italia per la disponibilitá dei dati. II lavoro é stato parzialmente finanziato dal MURST e da CNR & MURST all'interno dei progetti 'Occupazione e disoccupazione in Italia: misura ed analisi dei comportamenti' e Tensions, Savings and Portfolio Choices'. Parte di questa ricerca é stata svolta nell'ambito del "gruppo di lavoro" ISTAT "avente il compito di definire un piano di fattibilità sulla costruzione di una banca dati integrata délie indagini sui consumi e sui redditi délie famiglie, di fonte ISTAT e Bankitalia". Tuttavia, le opinioni espresse in questo studio, corne pure la responsabilità di eventuali errori, sono interamente dell'autore.

The paper studies the relationship between inequality and economic growth. This is done in a two sector model of endogenous growth with agents characterized by heterogeneity of factor endowments. The private sector consists of a large number of competitive ¯rms who produce the only ¯nal good in the economy. This good is both consumable as well as accumulable. The government is seen to produce a productive factor interpreted as infrastructure. Infrastructure is both nonrival and accumulable. Infrastructural services °ow into the production of infrastructural stocks as well as the ¯nal good. Capital used for infrastructural production is ¯nanced by the government by taxing capital income. The choice of the growth rate is determined by the tax rate on capital income. We study the choice of the economy's growth rate under a median voter democracy. The results show that inequality of the distribution of capital does not hamper growth.

The paper studies the relationship between inequality and economic growth. This is done in a two sector model of endogenous growth with agents characterized by heterogeneity of factor endowments. The private sector consists of a large number of competitive firms who produce the only final good in the economy. This good is both consumable as well as accumulable. The government is seen to produce a productive factor interpreted as infrastructure. Infrastructure is both nonrival and accumulable. Infrastructural services flow into the production of infrastructural stocks as well as the final good. Capital used for infrastructural production is financed by the government by taxing capital income. The choice of the growth rate is determined by the tax rate on capital income. We study the choice of the economy's growth rate under a median voter democracy. The results show that inequality of the distribution of capital does not hamper growth.

Income inequality has risen sharply in the United States over the past generation, reaching levels not seen since before World War II. But while almost two-thirds of Americans agree with the statement that 'income differences in the United States are too large', policies aimed at reducing income differences command relatively little popular support. In most rich countries sizeable majorities 'agree strongly' that the government ought to guarantee each citizen a minimum standard of living. Only one American in four agrees strongly with this proposition. The same pattern holds in Congress, where legislators show little interest in policies aimed at taxing the rich, raising the wages of the poor, taxing inherited wealth, or guaranteeing shelter and health care to all Americans. The first three sections of this paper describe how the distribution of income has changed in the United States since the 1970s, why it changed, and why it is more unequal than the distribution in other rich democracies. We then assess the evidence on whether changes in economic inequality affect four other things that Americans care about - economic growth, equality of opportunity for children, longevity, and the distribution of political influence. Section 4 concludes that inequality probably does not have a consistent effect, either positive or negative, on economic growth in rich democracies. Section 5 shows that college attendance became more related to parental income as economic inequality increased in the United States, but it does not find much evidence that a father's economic status has had more influences on his children's economic prospects in the United States than in other rich countries where incomes were more equal. Section 6 argues that increases in economic inequality probably slow the rate of improvement in longevity, but the effect is very small. Thus, we conclude that rising inequality may have lowered life expectancy, but only by a few months. Section 7 discusses the impact of economic inequality on the distribution of political power, arguing that increases in economic inequality tend to increase the political power of the rich, at least in the United States. We conclude by arguing that since the effects of inequality on economic growth, health, and equality of opportunity are modest and uncertain in rich countries, these countries should decide how much economic inequality they are willing to tolerate largely on the basis of what they think is just.

In this paper, we assume that redistribution modifies the community structure of an economy and generates both intra and intergenerational mobility. In a world in which neighbourhood attributes and family backgrounds are important to determine the investment effort and the productivity of education, we abandon the stylised median voter in favour of more nuanced pressure-group reasoning and study (i) the conflicts of material interest, (ii) both the income distribution and growth dynamics. We find multiple politico-economic regimes where the pressure for redistribution is highly non-linear depending on social affinity. In some range of inequality, the ends may oppose high rates of redistribution against the middle and more unequal and segmented economies may redistribute less, not more. Our framework displays multiple steady states describing either a situation of equality and integration or segregation with persistent inequality depending on historical economic discrimination. Re-distribution increases the number of candidates for the integrated equilibrium, but an economy's institutions will have first to overcome ranges of inequality in which voting cycles are likely to emerge.

In this paper, we abandon the stylized median voter and study (i) how distributional tensions can act in many different ways depending on social affinity and on the prospect of upward or downwardmobility of the different income classes, (ii) income distribution dynamics, intergenerational community formation and growth. In a world in which redistributive policies, whether fiscal or educational, affect how the entire economy breaks up into different communities, we find multiple politico-economic regimes that are supported by new international empirical evidence. In particular, we highlight a political economy decision mechanism through which the pressure for redistribution can be highly non linear therefore providing an explanation as to whymore inequality can be associated with less, rather than more, redistributive taxation. Our framework displays multiple steady states which depend on historical economic discrimination. We also provide sufficient conditions on the initial pattern of income distribution and local versus social spillovers ratio under which inequality and segregation persist in the long run.

In this paper, we abandon the stylized median voter and study (i) how distributional tensions can act in many different ways depending on social affinity and on the prospect of upward or downwardmobility of the different income classes, (ii) income distribution dynamics, intergenerational community formation and growth. In a world in which redistributive policies, whether fiscal or educational, affect how the entire economy breaks up into different communities, we find multiple politico-economic regimes that are supported by new international empirical evidence. In particular, we highlight a political economy decision mechanism through which the pressure for redistribution can be highly non linear therefore providing an explanation as to whymore inequality can be associated with less, rather than more, redistributive taxation. Our framework displays multiple steady states which depend on historical economic discrimination. We also provide sufficient conditions on the initial pattern of income distribution and local versus social spillovers ratio under which inequality and segregation persist in the long run.