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This article reviews the sociological and economic literature on intergenerational mobility. Findings on social class, occupational status, earnings, and income mobility are discussed and discrepancies among them are evaluated. The review also examines nonlinearities in the intergenerational association, variation in mobility across advanced industrial countries, and recent mobility trends in the United States. The literature suggests an association between inequality and economic mobility at the country level, with the United States featuring higher inequality and lower mobility than other advanced industrial countries. However, mobility has not declined in the United States over the recent decades in which inequality has expanded. The inequality-mobility relationship fails to emerge when occupational measures of mobility are used, likely because these measures do not fully capture some mechanisms of economic reproduction. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Inc., copyright The American Academy of Political and Social Science.]

In this study we concentrate on the effect of the housing situation on income inequality, for Flanders and the Netherlands in the year 2005/6. We analyze the income inequality using the disposable household income before and after housing expenses. The most important conclusion is that the income inequality increases in both 'countries' when the equivalent disposable income is corrected for housing expenditure. With regard to the subsidy mechanisms, the role of the housing allowance system in the Netherlands is remarkable. The housing allowance is generally granted to the lower incomes on the rental market and keeps the increase in equality after deduction of housing expenses relatively small in the Netherlands compared to Flanders. The fiscal advantage of a mortgage loan is – due to characteristics of the fiscal system – generally higher for owner-occupiers (with a mortgage) with higher incomes and increases general income inequality.

This paper emphasizes the properties of a family of inequality measures
which extends the Atkinson indices and is axiomatically characterized
by a multiplicative decomposition property where the withingroup
component is a generalized weighted mean with weights summing
exactly to 1. This family contains canonical forms of all aggregative
inequality measures, each bounded above by 1, has a useful
and intuitive geometric interpretation and provides an alternative dominance
criterion for ordering distributions in terms of inequality.
Taking the Spanish Household Budget Surveys (HBS) for 1973/74,
1980/81, and 1990/91 and the more recent Continuous HBS for 2003,
we show the advantages and possibilities of this extended family in
regard to completing and detailing information in studies of inequality
focussing on the tails of the distribution and on the changes in the distribution
when the population is partitioned into population subgroups.

Both policymakers and scholars have expressed concern that trade has increased inequality in advanced industrialized countries (AICs). We argue that the impact of trade on inequality depends on the availability of public goods, such as educational opportunities, that allow displaced workers to upgrade their skills and adjust to trade. The provision of public goods, in turn, depends on political institutions: institutions that unify budgetary powers promote public-good spending while institutions that separate budgetary powers discourage it. Trade should thus increase inequality more (reduce inequality less) in countries with a high separation of budgetary powers. We test and find support for these hypotheses with a cross-sectional time-series analysis of fourteen AICs. Our results imply that trade can improve aggregate welfare without worsening economic inequities, but only if governments adopt complementary policies that facilitate human capital formation and labor-market adjustment.

The author provides an economist's perspective on a set of articles examining the role of sociologists in studying recent trends in inequality in the United States. Three themes underlie his comments. First, effective investigations of empirical questions require a combination of statistics and theory. This means the same data can be organized differently according to different theories and doing so leads to greater insight. Second, having more than one discipline work on a problem is helpful not just in providing multiple potential explanations but also in getting researchers to question orthodoxy within their own disciplines; for example, it is important that sociologists not buy into the economics orthodoxy on inequality. Third, many questions related to recent inequality trends are particularly suited to examinations with sociology's tool kit; evidence from this set of articles is that more sociologists are applying those tools to explaining rising inequality in the United States.

We apply several well‐being measures that combine average income with a measure of inequality to international and intertemporal comparisons of well‐being in transition countries. Our well‐being measures drastically change the impression of levels and changes in well‐being compared to a traditional reliance on income measures. Due to low inequality and moderate income levels, socialist countries enjoyed relatively high levels of economic well‐being. In the transition process, rising inequality and falling incomes have led to a dramatic absolute decline in well‐being and a considerable drop in relative well‐being vis‐à‐vis non‐transition countries. We also find a close correlation between income losses and inequality increases. While the transition has been successful in expanding political and civil rights, our indicators suggest that most transition countries are still below the level of economic well‐being of the late 1980s.JEL classification: D6, O15, P27.

In this paper we discussed socioeconomic inequality among ethnic communities in Iran. There were significant clues to the widening gap between Persian and non-Persian communities. That is, contrary to the existing theories, modernization and industrialization have not been accompanied with improvement in the distribution of the resources among ethnic communities; rather they have increased inequality. Thus, we looked into the particular nature of Iranian modernization for causes of interethnic inequality. Political centralization, domination of Persian language and culture, and centralization of early industrialization contributed much to the development of the interethnic inequality at early stage of the Iranian modernization. In the new area, the 1960s–1970s, the existing gap was further widened by centralized and urban-biased economic growth. This was possible only because of the government's unique access to the increasing oil revenues which were generated with very little help from the domestic means of production.

The concept of equality of opportunity (EOp) goes back to Roemer (1993, 1998) who argues that a society shall guarantee its members equal access to advantage regardless of their circumstances, while holding them responsible for turning that access into actual advantage by the application of effort. Such arguments have been on the political agenda across the European Union, where the recent enlargements have brought together countries with rather different economic, social, and political backgrounds. This paper investigates how family background influences income acquisition in 15 European countries. It also scrutinizes how governments affect EOp through the design of their tax and transfer schemes. Our overall results suggest that the link between family background and economic success is usually tighter in relatively poor countries than in rich countries. Moreover, we find a clear country clustering for the Scandinavian, the Continental European, and the Anglo-Saxon countries. For Eastern Europe, our results are less definite. Looking at the impact of the tax and benefit schemes in the EU, it can be concluded that both taxes and transfers reduce inequality of opportunities, with social benefits typically playing the key role. Furthermore, the equalizing impacts of the tax benefit system on inequality of opportunity differ substantially from the ones observed when referring to the traditional notion of inequality of outcomes.

This paper constructs distributional national accounts for Austria for the period 2004-2016. We enrich survey data with tabulated tax data and make it fully consistent with national accounts data. The comprehensive dataset allows us to analyse the distribution of macroeconomic growth across the income distribution and to explore the evolution of income inequality in pre-tax income over time. Our results suggest that the distribution of growth has changed over time, which had considerable repercussions on inequality. Inequality started to decline at the very beginning of the economic and financial crisis in 2007, however it has increased again after 2012. We further provide novel insights into the evolution of capital income for top income groups and explore redistribution mechanisms that operated in Austria. Government spending was found to play a key role for redistributive effects across the income distribution. In particular, the transfer system redistributes pre-tax income to a large extent.

While China's socialist revolution has been credited with improving the status of women, gender inequality remains. Drawing on macro data, this article provides an overview of gender equality in China, focusing on labor force and political participation in the past 70 years, particularly since 1978, the onset of socioeconomic reform. Specifically, the article describes, compares, and examines the progress and challenges that women face in accessing economic opportunities and political resources. We find a more equal relationship between male and female when resources are relatively adequate, but that females are disadvantaged when resources are scarce, for example, including representation in more prestigious occupations, higher income, and political positions. These findings illustrate how inequality is maintained and reproduced, and suggest that despite China's progressive socialist agenda, its gender revolution remains 'stalled.'

A model is proposed here to investigate how the relationships between health, production, and wellbeing contribute to the achievement (or otherwise) of potential government objectives. This model uses a basic general equilibrium framework with heterogeneous individuals and two goods (healthcare and other). Public health and publically and privately provided healthcare affect health level, which in turn affects productivity. Several different potential objectives of the government agent are investigated, which determine the distribution of public healthcare. The model is solved numerically to understand the effects of the choices of government objectives including the level of inequality aversion and varying tax rates. For governments with high inequality aversion that maximise social welfare from utility, a non-zero tax rate may be optimal, even with high levels of public health.

This paper examines the role of effort in the process of educational attainment. First, I analyze the impact of effort on future tertiary educational attainment. Then, I test two sociological theories that argue that effort transmits educational inequality across generations. According to the first theory, parental background shapes the effort that children exert in education-related activities. The second theory argues that the drivers of effort in this context are educational expectations. I use a variable for effort that is measured directly over the course of the PISA test. Using a longitudinal dataset from Australia, I estimate different hierarchical and structural equations models. I find that the measure of effort is positively and significantly associated with the probability of having obtained a tertiary degree ten years later. Furthermore, the results show partial support for the second theory but not for the first one. ; The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 758600).

This article focuses of Archbishop Desmond Tutu's role against the apartheid system of racism and socio-political inequality in the Republic of South Africa. Tutu often denounced apartheid in his speeches and public advocacy promoting equality, reconciliation, and peaceful coexistence of all South Africans. The ideology of apartheid robbed the black race in South Africa of their human dignity which contradicts the Holy Bible which states, "So God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them" (Genesis 1:27). Despite this, the white National Party of South Africa in 1948 legitimized apartheid as a political system and gained support from the Dutch Reformed Church despite its anti-Christian ethics. Apartheid was adopted to place the white minority in the upper class, while the black majority was left with fewer rights and fewer privileges in South Africa. Desmond Tutu was one of the few Christian leaders in Africa who championed the course for black theology in the demolition of apartheid in South Africa. Tutu's attitude during the apartheid struggle was not by violent protest or riots but rather through his sermons and public participation in activities clamoring for national unity, love, and equality of all South Africans.