The global significance of national inequality decline

Abstract

Since the 1980s inequality has been rising in Europe, North America and parts of Asia. How does our understanding of global inequality dynamics change if coverage is extended to the rest of the developing world? To rebalance the perspective on global inequality trends, this paper surveys data and literature on recent inequality trends in Latin America, Asia, Africa and the Middle East. It finds that in these regions there are more countries with falling than rising inequality over the past 20 years, as measured by ginis of income or consumption inequality. At the global level, therefore, there are signs of inequality convergence, as inequality has been falling in countries with high inequality in the 1990s (particularly Latin America), and rising in historically low-inequality countries. We discuss the political and economic drivers of inequality decline in countries with a steady fall in the gini. This suggests some common trends across the globe, including the role of democratization, the rise of new social movements, the expansion of education and social safety nets and favourable commodity prices, in reducing income disparities. This paper calls for more country-level comparisons of inequality trends, to highlight the multiplicity of paths in this latest phase of globalization.

Trends in inequality within countries using a novel dataset

“…changing less than 1 Gini point), and another 8 per cent with no data. This and other evidence (e.g., Frazer 2006;Simson and Savage 2020) suggest that amid a large level of heterogeneity, some patterns emerge in terms of trend, convergence (i.e. inequality in countries with initially high levels appears to decrease and vice versa), region (e.g., inequality increasing in North America or most of Asia, but declining in Latin America or the Middle East and North Africa), or level of development (e.g., inequality more clearly increasing in high-income countries).…”

Urban transport planning and access inequalities: A tale of two Colombian cities

“…Although this gives an idea about the differences in access, it is necessary to consider the existence of horizontal and vertical inequalities. In Latin America, one of the most unequal regions in the world (Bárcena & Byanyima, 2016;Simson & Savage, 2020), some studies report that low income and socially vulnerable populations also experience adverse effects due to low-quality transport, having longer travel times and higher generalised travel costs to access opportunities to increase their economic, human and social capital Oviedo & Guzman, 2020). Transport costs are, from an accessibility perspective, both a driver of exclusion, segregation and inaccessibility, and a consequence of urban trajectories that have pushed low-income and other vulnerable populations to areas with poorer accessibility (Guzman & Oviedo, 2018), resulting in a self-reinforcing cycle of disadvantage.…”

Piketty comes to South Africa

“…Outside of southern Africa, most African countries have a Gini coefficient below 0.5, and there is also variation in the trends in inequality. Simson and Savage (2020) identify Mali, Guinea, Burkina Faso, Niger, and Mauritania as experiencing declines in their Gini coefficients between the early 1990s and 2010. This might be a further reason why the African experience has not figured centrally—unlike the American, European, Chinese, and South American cases—in a global analysis of inequality dynamics, the trends of the continent are not easily generalizable.…”

“…Most recent research on inequality has been led by Branko Milanovic’s (2016) analysis of global inequality, as encapsulated in his famous “elephant graph.” In fact, Milanovic's analysis drew on long standing debates within development studies over inequality, growth, and development (Stewart, 2016) and more recent work by Bourguignon (2017) and others which pointed to the decline of “between nation” inequality, even at the same time that “within nation” inequality was often (though not always) on the rise. This more optimistic interpretation was boosted by evidence from some parts of the world, especially in South America, which pointed to cases of inequality decline in the early 2000s (see Lustig et al (2012) and the discussion in Simson and Savage (2020)).…”