Why Inequality Matters: Some Economic Issues

Ethics and International Affairs

Volumn 15, Issue 2, 2001, Pages 3-28

  Birdsall, Nancy ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 85016362534     PISSN: 08926794     EISSN: 17477093     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1747-7093.2001.tb00356.x     Document Type: Article

References (87)

1. See Richard H. Tawney, Equality (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1952).
2. Simon Kuznets, “Economic Growth and Income Inequality,” American Economic Review 45, No. 1 (1955), pp. 1–28
3. Hollis Chenery and Moises Syrquin, Patterns of Development, 1950–1970 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975).
4. See Amartya Sen, Inequality Reexamined (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992).
5. Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom (New York: Knopf, 1999).
6. United Nations Development Programme, Human Development Report 2001, Making New Technology Work for Human Development (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).
7. United Nations Development Programme, Human Development Report 2000, Human Development and Human Rights (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999)
8. World Bank, World Development Report 2000/01: Attacking Poverty (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).
9. See Amartya Sen, “Possibility of Social Choice,” American Economic Review 89, No. 3 (June 1999), pp. 349–378.
10. See Peyton H. Young, Equity: In Theory and Practice (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).
11. Klaus Deininger and Lyn Squire, “A New Data Set Measuring Income Inequality,” World Bank Economic Review 10, No. 3 (Sept. 1996), pp. 565–591.
12. World Bank, World Development Report, 2000/2001
13. see also David Dollar and Aart Kraay, “Growth Is Good for the Poor,” World Bank Paper No. 2587, April 12, 2001.
14. Deepa Narayan, Voices of the Poor, Vol. 1.
15. Can Anyone Hear Us? Voices from 47 Countries (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 1999).
16. Nicholas Kaldor, “Capital Accumulation and Economic Growth,” in Nicholas Kaldor, ed., Further Essays on Economic Theory (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1978), pp. 1–53.
17. Arthur M. Okun, Equality and Efficiency: The Big Tradeoff (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1975).
18. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971).
19. Julian R. Betts and John E. Roemer, “Equalizing Opportunity Through Educational Finance Reform” (paper presented at the First Workshop of the LACE/IDB/World Bank Inequality and Poverty Network, Buenos Aires, Argentina, August 25, 1998).
20. Nancy Birdsall and Carol Graham, “Mobility and Markets: Conceptual Issues and Policy Questions,” in Nancy Birdsall and Carol Graham, eds., New Markets, New Ideas: Economic and Social Mobility in a Changing World (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution and Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2000), pp. 3–21.
21. Isabel V. Sawhill, “Opportunity in the United States: Myth or Reality,” in Birdsall and Graham, eds., New Markets, New Ideas.
22. Gary Fields, “Income Mobility: Concepts and Measures,” in Birdsall and Graham, eds., New Markets, New Ideas, pp. 101–134.
23. Jere Behrman, Nancy Birdsall, and Miguel Szekely, “Intergenerational Mobility in Latin America: Deeper Markets and Better Schools Make a Difference,” in Nancy Birdsall and Carol Graham, eds., New Markets, New Opportunities? Economic and Social Mobility in a Changing World (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution and Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1999), pp. 135–167.
24. New Opportunities? Economic and Social Mobility in a Changing World.
25. Sawhill, “Opportunity in the United States: Myth or Reality,” pp. 22–35.
26. Nancy Birdsall and Lesley O'Connell, “Putting Education to Work in Egypt,” Carnegie Endowment Working Paper #5 (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, October, 1999)
27. David Lam, “Generating Extreme Inequality: Schooling, Earnings and Intergenerational Transmission of Human Capital in South Africa and Brazil,” PSC Report, No. 99–439 (Ann Arbor: Population Studies Center, University of Michigan, 1999).
28. World Bank, The East Asian Miracle: Economic Growth and Public Policy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).
29. Alberto Alesina and Dani Rodrik, “Distributive Politics and Economic Growth,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 109, No. 2 (May 1994), pp. 465–490.
30. William Easterly and Sergio Rebelo, “Fiscal Policy and Economic Growth: An Empirical Investigation,” Journal of Monetary Economics 32, No. 3 (1993), pp. 417–458.
31. Nancy Birdsall, David Ross, and Richard Sabot, “Inequality and Growth Reconsidered: Lessons from East Asia,” World Bank Economic Review 9, No. 3 (1995), pp. 477–508.
32. See Roland Benabou, “Unequal Societies,” NBER Working Paper #5583 (Cambridge: National Bureau of Economic Research, May 1996)
33. Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, “Escaping the Efficiency-Equity Trade-off: Productivity-Enhancing Asset Redistribution,” in Gerald Epstein and Herbert Gintis, eds., Macroeconomic Policy After the Conservative Era: Studies in Investment, Saving and Finance (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 408–440.
34. Karla Hoff, “Market Failures and the Distribution of Wealth: A Perspective from the Economics of Information,” Politics and Society 24, No. 4 (1996), pp. 411–432.
35. Behrman, Birdsall, and Szekely, “Intergenerational Mobility in Latin America: Deeper Markets and Better Schools Make a Difference,” pp. 135–167.
36. Klaus Deininger and Pedro Olinto, “Asset Distribution, Inequality and Growth: An Illustration of World Bank's Inequality Data” (Washington, D.C.: World Bank mimeo, 1999).
37. Michael Carter, “Land Ownership, Inequality and the Income Distribution Consequences of Economic Growth” (paper presented for the conference “Rising Income Inequality and Poverty Reduction,” WIDER, Helsinki, December 11–13, 1999).
38. Nancy Birdsall and Juan Luis Londoño, “Assets Inequality Matters: An Assessment of the World Bank's Approach to Poverty Reduction,” Applied Economics in Action Papers and Proceedings (May 1997), pp. 32–37
39. Vinod Thomas and Yan Wang, “Revisiting the Lessons of Development” (Washington, D. C.: World Bank mimeo, 1999).
40. Philippe Aghion, Eva Caroli, and Cecelia García-Peñalosa, “Inequality and Economic Growth: The Perspective of the New Growth Theories,” Journal of Economic Literature 37 (December 1999), pp. 1615–1660.
41. Nancy Birdsall, Thomas C. Pinckney, and Richard Sabot, “Natural Resources, Human Capital and Growth” (paper prepared for the UNU/WIDER project on Environmental, Export and Human Capital Accumulation Problems of Resource Based Growth Models, 1999).
42. Ricardo Hausmann and Michael Gavin, “Securing Stability and Growth in a Shock-Prone Region: The Policy Challenge for Latin America,” in Ricardo Hausmann and Helmut Riesen, eds., Securing Stability and Growth in Latin America: Policy Issues and Prospects for Shock-Prone Economies (Paris: OECD, 1996), pp. 23–64
43. Dani Rodrik, “Where Did All the Growth Go? External Shocks, Social Conflict, and Growth Collapse” (Cambridge: Harvard University mimeo, 1999)
44. Aghion, Caroli, and García-Peñalosa, “Inequality and Economic Growth: The Perspective of the New Growth Theories,” pp. 1615–1660.
45. Martin Ravallion, “Can High-Inequality Developing Countries Escape Absolute Poverty?” Economic Letters 56, No. 1 (September 1997), pp. 51–57.
46. Alain de Janvry and Elisabeth Sadoulet, “Growth, Poverty, and Inequality in Latin America: A Causal Analysis, 1970–1994,” in Nora Lustig, ed., Shield the Poor: Social Protection in the Developing World (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 2000).
47. This high-end inequality or concentration of income at the top may have slowed average growth, too, by preventing the dynamic multiplier effects that consumer demand would have generated for the industrial sector. See John Mellor, “Pro-Poor Growth: The Relation Between Growth in Agriculture and Poverty Reduction” (report prepared for USAID/GEGAD, November 1999)
48. Birdsall, Ross, and Sabot, “Inequality and Growth Reconsidered: Lessons from East Asia,” pp. 477–508. This may be part of the reason for the finding of Birdsall and Londoño, reported above, that inequality of education and land are associated with less growth of income among the poor than for other income groups.
49. James M. Buchanan, Robert D. Tollison, and Gordon Tullock, eds., Toward a Theory of the Rent-Seeking Society (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1980).
50. Lant Pritchett and Deon Filmer, “What Educational Production Functions Really Show,” World Bank Policy Research Working Paper, 1975 (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 1997).
51. Nancy Birdsall and Estelle James, “Efficiency and Equity in Social Spending: How and Why Governments Misbehave,” in Michael Lipton and Jacques van der Gaag, eds., Including the Poor: Proceedings of a Symposium Organized by the World Bank and the International Food Policy Research Institute (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 1993), pp. 335–358.
52. Nancy Birdsall and Robert Hecht, “Swimming Against the Tide: Strategies for Improving Equity in Health,” in Christopher Colclough, ed., Marketising Education and Health in Developing Countries (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 347–366.
53. Nancy Birdsall, David Ross, and Richard Sabot, “Inequality and Growth Reconsidered: Lessons from East Asia,” pp. 477–508.
54. Jere Behrman and Nancy Birdsall, “Quality of Schooling: Quality Alone Is Misleading,” American Economic Review 73, No. 5 (1983), pp. 928–946.
55. Thomas M. Scanlon, cited in Charles R. Beitz, “Does Global Inequality Matter?” Metaphilosophy 32 (January 2001), pp. 95–112.
56. William Darity Jr., “Intergroup Inequalities Across Countries” (paper presented at the Macrodynamics of Economic Inequality conference, Jerome Levy Economics Institute, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, October 28–29, 1999).
57. Beitz, “Does Global Inequality Matter?”
58. See Thomas M. Scanlon, What We Owe to Each Other (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998).
59. See Nancy Birdsall, “Life Is Unfair: Inequality in the World,” Foreign Policy (Summer 1998), pp. 76–93.
60. The essays in Nancy Birdsall, Carol Graham, and Richard Sabot, eds., Beyond Tradeoffs: Market Reforms and Equitable Growth in Latin America (Washington, D.C.: Inter-American Development Bank, Brookings Institution Press, 1998) discuss a range of policies that can enhance both efficiency and equity, yet are not always chosen.
61. See Jeffrey Sachs and Andrew Warner, “Sources of Slow Growth in African Economies,” Journal of African Economics 6, No. 3 (October 1997), pp. 335–376.
62. Richard Easterlin, “Will Raising the Incomes of All Increase the Happiness of All?” Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 27, No. 1 (June 1995), pp. 35–47.
63. See Nancy Birdsall, Carol Graham, and Stefano Pettinato, “Stuck in the Tunnel: Have New Markets Muddled the Middle Class?” Working Paper Number 14 (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution and Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2000), pp. 3–21.
64. Amartya Sen, Inequality Reexamined.
65. Robert Putnam, Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).
66. D. Parthasarathy and V. K. Chopde, “Building Social Capital: Collective Action, Adoption of Agricultural Innovations, and Poverty Reduction in the Indian Semi-Arid Tropics” (paper for the Global Development Network meeting, Tokyo, Japan, December 2000).
67. Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
68. John K. Galbraith, The Affluent Society, 3d ed., rev. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976).
69. Mickey Kaus, The End of Equality (New York: Harper Collins, 1992).
70. Alberto Alesina and Eliana La Ferrara, “Participation in Heterogeneous Communities,” NBER Wo r king Paper #7155 (Cambridge: National Bureau of Economic Research, June 1999); available at www.nber.org/papers/w7155.
71. See also Pranab Bardhan, Samuel Bowles, and Herbert Gintis, “Wealth Inequality, Wealth Constraints and Economic Performance,” in Anthony Atkinson and François Bourguignon, eds., Handbook on Income Distribution (Elsevier, North Holland, 1999), pp. 541–603.
72. Eliana La Ferrara, “Inequality and Participation: Theory and Evidence from Rural Tanzania,” unpublished paper
73. cited by Alesina and La Ferrara, “Participation in Heterogeneous Communities,” p.14.
74. Abhijit V. Banerjee, Dilip Mookherjee, Kalvan Munshi, and Debraj Ray, “Inequality, Control Rights and Rent-Seeking: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis of Sugar Cooperatives in Maharashtra,” mimeo, 1998
75. cited in Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo, “Inequality and Growth: What Can the Data Say?” NBER Working Paper #7793, (Cambridge: National Bureau of Economic Research, July 2000).
76. Alesina and La Ferrara, “Participation in Heterogeneous Communities,” p. 23.
77. Raquel F. Fernandez and Richard R. Rogerson, “Income Distribution, Communities and the Quality of Public Education,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 111, No. 1 (1996), pp. 135–164.
78. Juan-Camilo Cardenas, “Real Wealth and Experimental Cooperation: Evidence from Field Experiments” (paper for Global Development Network Meeting, Tokyo, Japan, December 2000).
79. Pablo Fajnzylber, Daniel Lederman, and Norman Loayza, “Inequality and Violent Crime” (Washington, D.C.: World Bank mimeo, 1999).
80. Anthony Atkinson, “Equity Issues in a Globalizing World: The Experience of OECD Countries,” in Vito Tanzi, Ke-young Chu, and Sanjeev Gupta, eds., Economic Policy and Equity (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, International Monetary Fund, 1999), pp. 63–80; quotation at p. 68.
81. George Akerlof, “A Theory of Social Custom, of Which Unemployment May Be One Consequence,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 94, No. 4 (June 1980), pp. 749–775.
82. Easterly and Rebelo, “Fiscal Policy and Economic Growth: An Empirical Investigation,” pp. 417–458
83. Robert Barro, The Determinants of Growth: A Cross-Country Empirical Study, Lionel Robbins Lectures (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997)
84. see Birdsall and Londoño, “Asset Inequality Matters,” pp. 32–37
85. Thomas and Wang, “Revisiting the Lessons of Development.”
86. Francois Bourguignon and Thierry Verdier, in “The Political Economy of Education and Development in an Open Economy,” (unpublished mimeo, Delta, Paris, November 2000), model the effects of open capital markets and other liberalization measures on redistribution, including through political change.
87. See also Nancy Birdsall, “Managing Inequality in the Developing World,” Current History (November 1999), pp. 336–381.