What is Really Happening with Global Inequality?

Abstract

We use the latest available data from the World Income Inequality Database 3.4 and the Penn World Tables 9.0 to examine some of the core issues and concerns that have animated research on global inequality. We begin by reviewing the evidence on trends in within-country inequality, drawing out some of the implications of this for our thinking about inequality and economic development. We examine betweencountry inequality, computing updated estimates of trends in both unweighted and population-weighted between-country inequality. The data reveal that inequality between countries increased across the latter half of the twentieth century, then turned to decline measurably thereafter. We show that this decline is robust to a range of methodological and measurement decisions identified as important in previous research. We then examine estimates of true global inequality, situating these in relation to lower-and upper-bound estimates of global inequality. We conclude by noting the critical and contested role of globalization in inequality reduction.

Where are Fossil Fuels Displaced by Alternatives?

“…Previous work suggests that novel fuels intended to replace more carbon-intensive fuels do not do so proportionally, and these patterns may be influenced by domestic inequality (York 2012;Greiner, York, and McGee 2018;McGee and Greiner 2018). Given the linked systems of oppression which influence the continuation of withinnation inequality, particularly economic inequality and inequality between nations, this paper extends discussions of the links between energy development and social inequality by examining how fuel use within nations varies by world-systems position (Alderson and Pandian 2018). "World-systems position" has been used to describe lasting historical inequality among nations and regions, which has been connected to disparities of the environmental impact of global production and economic growth (Bunker 1985;Jorgenson 2006;Rice 2007;Wallerstein 2004).…”

Recent Trends in Global Economic Inequality

“…China and India are still decisive contributors to this decline. What the new deflator brings is an increase in the absolute level of the inequality measure for each year, while the declining trend of inequality over time remains the same (Alderson & Pandian 2018, Hung & Kucinskas 2011; see also Bussolo et al 2007).…”

“…The boom in China and India drove up commodities prices. The two countries became new, alternative sources of investments that benefit other developing countries (Alderson & Pandian 2018, Hung & Kucinskas 2011, Jepson 2020).…”

The New Progressivism and its implications for institutional theories of development

“…Moreover, GDP per capita only tells part of the story. Despite notable improvements in several of the most historically unequal countries such as Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico (UNU-WIDER, 2020), there has been an increase in within-country inequality in high-income countries as well as many low-and middle-income countries (LMICs) (Alderson & Pandian, 2018;Niño-Zarazúa et al, 2014;Sauer et al, 2020). This is particularly notable in China, where the Gini coefficient doubled-from 23.0 to 46.2-between 1990(UNU-WIDER, 2020.…”