Income Inequality in Guyana: Class or Ethnicity? New Evidence from Survey Data

Collin Constantine ()
Additional contact information
Collin Constantine: Girton College, University of Cambridge

No 631, Working Papers from ECINEQ, Society for the Study of Economic Inequality

Abstract: This paper utilises recent survey data to estimate income inequality in Guyana from 1990 to 2021. It finds that class-based inequality exceeds ethnic income inequality, and the latter is more pronounced in the top 10 percent of the population. The over-representation of Indo- and Indigenous-Guyanese in the top decile increases class inequality within these groups because Afro- and Mixed-Guyanese are over-represented in the middle 40 and bottom 50 percent of the population. Thus, the magnitude of ethnic income differences violates the principle of distributive justice. The paper tentatively concludes that fiscal policy is the main explanation of the inequality dynamics, for example, the reduction of the middle class' share of income in 2017. Overall, the evidence indicates that intra-class competition for ethnic dominance of the top decile can account for inter-ethnic conflict, as politicians invest in ethnic prejudice and rivalry to weaken inter-class competition and strengthen the intra-class contest.

Keywords: Guyana; class-based inequality; ethnic income inequality; distributive justice (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D31 D63 J15 N36 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 41 pages
Date: 2022-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev and nep-lab
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.ecineq.org/milano/WP/ECINEQ2022-631.pdf First version, 2022 (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:ecineq2022-631

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 ).