Behind the Seven Veils of Inequality. What if it's all about the Struggle within just One Half of the Population over just One Half of the National Income?

Abstract

This article addresses three main issues: why there is such a huge diversity of disposable income inequality across the world, why there is such a deterioration of market inequality among countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), and why inequality seems to move in ‘waves’. There are many underlying questions: does diversity reflect a variety of fundamentals, or a multiplicity of power structures and choice? Is rising market inequality the product of somehow ‘exogenous’ factors (e.g., r>g), or of complex interactions between political settlements and market failures? How do we get through the veils obscuring these interactions and distorting our vision of the often self‐constructed nature of inequality? Has neoliberal globalization broadened the scope for ‘distributional failures’ by, for example, triggering a process of ‘reverse catching‐up’ in the OECD, so that highly unequal middle‐income countries like those in Latin America now embody the shape of things to come? Are we all converging towards features such as mobile élites creaming off the rewards of economic growth, and ‘magic realist’ politics that lack self‐respect if not originality? Should I say, ‘Welcome to the Third World’? In this paper I also develop a new approach for examining and measuring inequality (distance from distributive targets), and a new concept of ‘distributional waves’. The article concludes that, to understand current distributive dynamics, what matters is to comprehend the forces determining the share of the rich — and, in terms of growth, what they choose to do with it (and how they are allowed do it).

Desindustrialización, desindustrialización "prematura" y "síndrome holandés"

“…En este caso, desde el punto de vista del crecimiento económico, hay algo muy especial en el tamaño relativo del sector manufacturero, pues éste es el motor más efectivo para el crecimiento por sus economías dinámicas de escala, sus efectos spill over, etc. Esto es, entre otros factores (como la desigualdad [Palma, 2019a], las políticas de demanda efectiva, el tipo de macro, el rol del estado, etc. ), el crecimiento económico depende de qué es lo que se produzca.…”

“…En estos modelos, el patrón de crecimiento, los retornos crecientes y la dinámica del crecimiento económico en general son altamente dependientes de las actividades económicas que se estén desarrollando; es decir, de la estructura de la producción y del empleo. La gran diferencia entre este grupo y los dos anteriores es que, en sus formulaciones más clásicas, temas como la capacidad de generar y difundir el cambio tecnológico, las posibilidades de crecimiento de la productividad, la capacidad de ascender en la escala tecnológica, las sinergias, las externalidades y los spill over effects, la sostenibilidad de la balanza de pagos, la desigualdad (Palma, 2019a), las ganancias del comercio exterior y la capacidad de los países en desarrollo de cerrar la brecha con los países desarrollados (catching up) están directamente relacionados con el tamaño, la fortaleza y la profundidad del sector manufacturero. 41 En las teorías más recientes de este tercer grupo analítico del crecimiento, los retornos crecientes, las "indivisibilidades", el capital complementario, los bienes públicos, los derechos de propiedad, la capacidad empresarial, los costos de transacción y la efectividad de la estructura de incentivos también se relacionan (directa o indirectamente, explícita o implícitamente) con la estructura de la producción.…”

“…resumen La frustración en América Latina con las reformas económicas neoliberales ha reabierto una serie de debates, en especial sobre desigualdad (Palma, 2019a) y productividad (Palma, 2019c)-en 2018, la productividad promedio de la región fue sólo 8% superior a la de 1980, esto equivale a un crecimiento promedio anual de apenas 0.2%-. Durante el ciclo anterior, de 1950 a 1980, en cambio, ésta se duplicó y más, con una tasa de crecimiento de 2.8% anual.…”

Neoliberalism 4.0: The Rise of Illiberal Capitalism Comment on "How Neoliberalism Is Shaping the Supply of Unhealthy Commodities and What This Means for NCD Prevention"

“…In his brilliant excoriation of neoliberalism's disequalizing inevitability, the heterodox development economist, Jose Gabriel Palma, notes that "the current re-emergence of neofascism" (a less polite way to describe our autocratic and increasingly xenophobic body politic) is marked by its "tendency to mix extreme-right politics and 'dark ages' morality, with exactly the same primordial neoliberal economics and acute inequality. " 16 There may still be a push for open markets, but only if unabashedly benefiting the geopolitical interests of more powerful states and the economic interests of their elites -a world in which bilateral power trumps any pretext of multilateral equity. The 'real economy' of production and consumption (whether of healthy or unhealthy commodities) will persist but will play second fiddle to a global financialized economy that thrives and grows despite 2008's global financial meltdown.…”

Measuring Income Inequality Across Countries and Over Time: The Standardized World Income Inequality Database

“…Then, the SWIID routine estimates the relationships between Gini indices based on the LIS and all of the other Ginis available for the same country‐years, and it uses these relationships to estimate what the LIS Gini would be in country‐years not included in the LIS but available from other sources. This approach has made the SWIID a preferred source of income inequality data for researchers pursuing broadly cross‐national work across a wide range of disciplines, including not only economics (e.g., Berg et al., 2018; Darvas, 2019; Palma, 2019), political science (e.g., Dorsch and Maarek, 2019; Iversen and Soskice, 2019; Engler and Weisstanner, 2020), and sociology (e.g., Steele, 2016; Dawson, 2018; Jaime‐Castillo and Marqués‐Perales, 2019) but also fields such as public health (e.g., Ngamaba, 2016; Alvarez and El‐Sayed, 2017) and psychology (e.g., Blake et al., 2018; Schmukle, Korndörfer, and Egloff, 2019).…”