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, 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 on 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 like 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 / Carlos Gradín, Murray Leibbrandt and Finn Tarp -- 2. What might explain today’s conflicting narratives on global inequality? / Martin Ravallion -- 3. Comparing global inequality of income and wealth / James Davies and Anthony F. Shorrocks -- 4. Empirical challenges comparing inequality across countries: The case of middle-income countries from the LIS database / Daniele Checchi, Andrej Cupak and Teresa Munzi -- 5. Brazil: What are the main drivers of income distribution changes in the new millennium? / Marcelo Neri -- 6. China: Structural change, transition, rent-seeking and corruption, and government policy / Shi Li, Terry Sicular and Finn Tarp -- 7. India: Inequality trends and dynamics, the bird’s-eye and the granular perspectives / Hai‐Anh H. Dang and Peter Lanjouw -- 8. Mexico: Labour markets and fiscal redistribution 1989–2014 / Raymundo M. Campos-Vázquez, Nora Lustig and John Scott -- 9. South Africa: The top-end, labour markets, fiscal redistribution and the persistence of very high inequality / Murray Leibbrandt, Vimal Ranchhod and Pippa Green -- 10. Economic inequality and subjective wellbeing across the world / Andrew E. Clark and Conchita D'Ambrosio -- 11. China and the United States: Different economic models but similarly low levels of socioeconomic mobility / Roy van der Weide and Ambar Narayan -- 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 / Joseph E. Stiglitz -- 13. Synthesis and policy implications: Inequality in the developing world / Carlos Gradín, Murray Leibbrandt and Finn Tarp.

xx, 352 p.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

9780198863960