Inequality from a global perspective: An alternative approach

Peter Edward and Andy Sumner
Additional contact information
Peter Edward: Newcastle University Business School
Andy Sumner: King's College London

No 302, Working Papers from ECINEQ, Society for the Study of Economic Inequality

Abstract: The interplay of between- and within-country inequality, the relative contribution of each to overall global inequality, and the implications this has for who benefits from recent global growth (and by how much), has become a significant avenue for economic research. Drawing conclusions from aggregate inequality indices such as the Gini and Theil reduces the highly complex nature of global inequality to a single coefficient and makes it impossible to take a nuanced view of how global growth interacts with changing national and international inequality. In light of this we propose and justify an alternative approach based on four consumption `layers' identified by reference to the global consumption distribution. We consider how each `layer' of global society has fared since the end of the Cold War.

Keywords: Poverty; inequality; economic development. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D63 I32 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 58 pages
Date: 2013-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.ecineq.org/milano/WP/ECINEQ2013-302.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:inq:inqwps:ecineq2013-302

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from ECINEQ, Society for the Study of Economic Inequality Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Maria Ana Lugo ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).