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Equality of opportunity is about leveling the playing field so that circumstances such as gender, ethnicity, place of birth, or family background do not influence a person's life chances. Success in life should depend on people's choices, effort and talents, not to their circumstances at birth. 'Measuring Inequality of Opportunities in Latin America and the Caribbean' introduces new methods for measuring inequality of opportunities and makes an assessment of its evolution in Latin America over a decade. An innovative Human Opportunity Index and other parametric and non-parametric techniques are presented for quantifying inequality based on circumstances exogenous to individual efforts. These methods are applied to gauge inequality of opportunities in access to basic services for children, learning achievement for youth, and income and consumption for adults.

In this article a major channel through which financialisation or finance-dominated capitalism affects macroeconomic performance is examined: the distribution channel. Empirical data for the following dimensions of (re-) distribution in the period of finance-dominated capitalism since the early 1980s is provided for 15 advanced capitalist economies: functional distribution, personal/household distribution and the share and the composition of top incomes. Based on the Kaleckian approach to the determination of income shares, the effects of financialisation on functional income distribution are studied in more detail. Some stylised facts of financialisation are integrated into the Kaleckian approach, and by means of reviewing empirical and econometric literature it is found that financialisation and neoliberalism have contributed to the falling labour income share since the early 1980s through three main Kaleckian channels: 1) a shift in the sectoral composition of the economy, 2) an increase in management salaries and rising profit claims of the rentiers and thus in overheads, and 3) weakened trade union bargaining power.

What do we mean by inequality comparisons? If the rich just get richer and the poor get poorer, the answer might seem easy. But what if the income distribution changes in a complicated way? Can we use mathematical or statistical techniques to simplify the comparison problem in a way that has economic meaning? What does it mean to measure inequality? Is it similar to National Income? Or price index? Is it enough just to work out the Gini coefficient? This book tackles these questions and examines the underlying principles of inequality measurement and its relation to welfare economics, distributional analysis, and information theory. The book covers modern theoretical developments in inequality analysis, as well as showing how the way we think about inequality today has been shaped by classic contributions in economics and related disciplines. Formal results and detailed literature discussion are provided in two appendices. The principal points are illustrated in the main text, using examples from US and UK data, as well as other data sources, and associated web materials provide hands-on learning.

Research on Economic Inequality, volume 26, primarily contains papers presented at the 8th Society for the Study of Economic Inequality (ECINEQ) meeting. The papers cover such topics as the effect of inheritance taxation on the \"pre-distribution\" of income, and tax progressivity under alternative inequality definitions.

America is becoming a class-based society.It's now conventional wisdom to focus on the excesses of the top 1% - especially the top 0.01% - and how the ultra-rich are hoarding income and wealth while incomes for most other Americans are stagnant. But the more important, and widening, gap in American society is between the upper middle class and everyone else.Reeves defines the upper middle class as those whose incomes are in the top 20 percent of American society. Income isn't the only way to measure a society, but in a market economy it is crucial because access to money generally determines who gets the best quality education, housing, health care, and other necessary goods and services.As Reeves shows, the growing separation between the upper middle class and everyone else can be seen in family structure, neighborhoods, attitudes, and lifestyle. Those at the top of the income ladder are becoming more effective at passing on their status to their children, reducing overall social mobility. The result is a fracturing of American society along class lines, not just an economic divide. Upper-middle-class children become upper-middle-class adults.These trends matter because the separation and perpetuation of the upper middle class corrode prospects for more progressive approaches to policy. Various forms of \"opportunity hoarding\" among the upper middle class make it harder for others to rise up to the top rung. Examples include zoning laws and schooling, occupational licensing, college application procedures, and the allocation of internships. Upper middle class opportunity hoarding, Reeves argues, results in a less competitive economy as well as a less open society.Inequality is inevitable and can even be good, within limits. But Reeves argues that society can take effective action to reduce opportunity hoarding and thus promote broader opportunity. This fascinating book shows how American society has become the very class-defined society that earlier Americans rebelled against - and what can be done to restore a more equitable society.

The distribution of incomes in South Africa in 2004, ten years after the transition to democracy, was probably more unequal than it had been under apartheid. In this book, Jeremy Seekings and Nicoli Nattrass explain why this is so, offering a detailed and comprehensive analysis of inequality in South Africa from the midtwentieth century to the early twenty-first century. They show that the basis of inequality shifted in the last decades of the twentieth century from race to class. Formal deracialization of public policy did not reduce the actual disadvantages experienced by the poor nor the advantages of the rich. The fundamental continuity in patterns of advantage and disadvantage resulted from underlying continuities in public policy, or what Seekings and Nattrass call the \"distributional regime.\" The post-apartheid distributional regime continues to divide South Africans into insiders and outsiders. The insiders, now increasingly multiracial, enjoy good access to well-paid, skilled jobs; the outsiders lack skills and employment.

This study analyzed how attitudes toward welfare vary or align in Korean society based on the distribution of income and assets. It aimed to identify coalition structures based on income and asset combinations surrounding the current welfare system. The analysis revealed that regardless of income level, groups that have not accumulated sufficient assets are more likely to have positive attitudes when it comes to advocating the expansion of public welfare spending. However, with regard to redistributive policies aimed at addressing social vulnerability, it is evident that there is currently no group capable of forming a coalition with the low-income, low-asset group. Therefore, it can be predicted that in the process of reforming the social security system, an approach of universal welfare policies, providing benefits to the majority of citizens, coupled with additional benefits proportional to the taxes paid, may receive high levels of support.

This paper identifies three reasons for studying factor shares: to make a link between incomes at the macroeconomic level (national accounts) and incomes at the level of the household; to help understand inequality in the personal distribution of income; and to address the concern of social justice with the fairness of different sources of income. In each case, I explore the implications and point to ways in which the analysis could be taken forward in a twenty-first-century treatment of the classical problem of political economy.

Growing Public examines the question of whether social policies that redistribute income impose constraints on economic growth. Taxes and transfers have been debated for centuries, but only now can we get a clear view of the whole evolution of social spending. What kept prospering nations from using taxes for social programs until the end of the nineteenth century? Why did taxes and spending then grow so much, and what are the prospects for social spending in this century? Why did North America become a leader in public education in some ways and not others? Lindert finds answers in the economic history and logic of political voice, population aging, and income growth. Contrary to traditional beliefs, the net national costs of government social programs are virtually zero. This book not only shows that no Darwinian mechanism has punished the welfare states, but uses history to explain why this surprising result makes sense. Contrary to the intuition of many economists and the ideology of many politicians, social spending has contributed to, rather than inhibited, economic growth.

This paper nonparametrically estimates the distribution of world citizens’ income and investigates world income inequality for the period from 1970 to 2010. We consider 188 countries that account for 98.68% of the world population and almost 100% of the world GDP in the year 2010. Various income inequality indices such as the Gini coefficient reveal that the world income inequality dramatically decreased during the 2000s, whereas it only slightly declined from 1970 to 2000, because the across-country inequality component substantially decreased during the 2000s even if the within-country inequality component kept increasing during the 1990s and the 2000s. These findings still hold when we include top income tax data in the analysis. We also propose more sophisticated methods to impute missing top income share data and to combine them with income survey data.