To test theoretical models intended to improve our understanding of the consequences of increased inequality for advantaged and disadvantaged populations. Copyright (c) 2007 Southwestern Social Science Association.

No abstract

There are many contending paradigms in the study of inequality and stratification, with little dialogue across empirical, methodological and theoretical divides. To bridge some of these gaps, this article presents and analyzes a new dataset on urban wages across the world. The data provide compelling evidence that national residence has been a significant and stable force shaping wage distribution. But the data also indicate that some occupations (e.g. tradable-good producers in low-wage regions) have experienced significant upward mobility. These processes highlight the need to critically reassess how the categories of 'skilled' and 'unskilled' are mobilized to justify global inequality.

Shifting the unit of analysis from the nation-state to the world as a whole fundamentally changes our understanding of migration. Elsewhere, the authors have argued that ascriptive criteria centered on national identity and citizenship have long served as a fundamental basis of inequality in the world. Here, they develop a model that seeks to identify the main forces driving migration across the world-economy. They test this model by drawing on an original cross-national dataset on population flows. This allows them to more precisely identify country- and region-specific patterns of outgoing and incoming migration, and to assess the relative weight of specific variables (e.g., wage differentials between countries, the extent of income inequality and social mobility in sending and receiving countries, civil war, famine, geopolitical location, and migration policy regimes) in explaining these patterns. Finally, the authors discuss the implications of their findings for a more productive understanding of global social stratification and mobility in the contemporary world-economy.

The United Nations' 2005 Report on the World Social Situation: The Inequality Predicament opens with the claim that “globalization has helped to accentuate trends that show the wealthiest 20 per cent of the planet accounting for 86 per cent of all private consumption and the poorest accounting for just above 1 per cent”; the first area demanding “urgent attention” in the report is “worldwide asymmetries deriving from globalization” (United Nations 2005: 6, 9). On the other hand, albeit writing about a previous wave of globalization in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Williamson (1997: 405) concluded that “globalization was the critical factor promoting economic convergence” not only between nations, but within nations as well. These two examples illustrate deep disagreements about the impact of globalization on inequality.