Inequality in the Developing World

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 IGO licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Inequality has emerged as a key development challenge. It holds implications for economic growth and redistribution and translates into power asymmetries that can endanger human rights, create conflict, and embed social exclusion and chronic poverty. For these reasons, it underpins intense public and academic debates and has become a dominant policy concern within many countries and in all multilateral agencies. It is at the core of the 17 goals of the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. This book contributes to this important discussion by presenting assessments of the measurement and analysis of global inequality by leading inequality scholars, aligning these to comprehensive reviews of inequality trends in five of the world's largest developing countries—Brazil, China, India, Mexico, and South Africa. Each is a persistently high or newly high inequality context and, with the changing global inequality situation as context, country chapters investigate the main factors shaping their different inequality dynamics. Particular attention is paid to how broader societal inequalities arising outside of the labour market have intersected with the rapidly changing labour market milieus of the last few decades. Collectively, these chapters provide a nuanced discussion of key distributive phenomena such as the high concentration of income among the most affluent people, gender inequalities, and social mobility. Substantive tax and social benefit policies that each country implemented to mitigate these inequality dynamics are assessed in detail. The book takes lessons from these contexts back into the global analysis of inequality and social mobility and the policies needed to address inequality.

1 - Setting the scene
2 - What might explain today's conflicting narratives on global inequality?
3 - Comparing global inequality of income and wealth
4 - Empirical challenges comparing inequality across countries: the case of middle-income countries from the LIS Database
5 - Brazil: what are the main drivers of income distribution changes in the new millennium?
6 - China: structural change, transition, rent seeking and corruption, and government policy
7 - India: inequality trends and dynamic: From manufacturing-led export growth to a twenty-first century inclusive growth strategy: explaining the demise of a successful growth model and what to do about it s, the bird's-eye and the granular perspectives
8 - Mexico: labour markets and fiscal redistribution 1989-2014
9 - South Africa: the top-end, labour markets, fiscal redistribution and the persistence of very high inequality
10 - Economic inequality and subjective wellbeing across the world
11 - China versus the United States: different economic models but similarly low levels of socioeconomic mobility
12 - From manufacturing-led export growth to a twenty-first century inclusive growth strategy: explaining the demise of a successful growth model and what to do about it
13 - Synthesis and policy implications

Carlos Gradín is a Research Fellow at the United Nations University World Institute for Development Economics Research (UNU-WIDER) in Helsinki, and Professor of Applied Economics at the University of Vigo. His main research interest is the study of poverty, inequality, and discrimination in both developed and developing countries, especially inequalities between population groups. His research deals with enhancing the empirical evidence as well as methodological tools for the measurement and understanding of those issues. His research has been widely published in several international journals. Murray Leibbrandt holds the National Research Foundation Chair in Poverty and Inequality Research in the School of Economics at the University of Cape Town. He is the Director of the Southern Africa Labour and Development Research Unit and the African Centre of Excellence for Inequality Research within the African Research Universities Alliance. He is on the Executive Committee of the International Economic Association and is a Senior Research Fellow of UNU-WIDER. From 2007 to 2019 he was a Principal Investigator on the National Income Dynamics Study, South Africa's national longitudinal study. He has published widely in development economics using survey data and especially panel data to analyse South African poverty, inequality, and labour market dynamics. Finn Tarp is a Professor at the University of Copenhagen (UCPH) and Coordinator of the UCPH Development Economics Research Group (DERG). Director of UNU-WIDER from 2009 to 2018, and now a Non-Resident Senior Fellow of UNU-WIDER, Professor Tarp is a leading international expert on development strategy and foreign aid, with an interest in poverty, income distribution, and growth, micro- and macroeconomic policy and modelling, agricultural sector policy and planning, household/enterprise development, and economic adjustment and reform as well as climate change, sustainability, and natural resources. He has published widely in leading economics and development journals and books by international academic publishers.