Economic Freedom and Equality: Friends or Foes?

Niclas Berggren ()

Public Choice, 1999, vol. 100, issue 3-4, pages 203-23

Abstract: How does economic freedom, mainly how property rights are designed and protected, relate to income equality? Whilst this is argued to be theoretically ambiguous, the empirical results reveal that there is a positive relationship between changes in economic freedom and equality: the more a country increased its economic freedom between 1975 and 1985, the higher the level of equality around 1985. Most important in this regard is trade liberalization and financial deregulation. Also, there are signs that the level of economic freedom in 1985 is negatively related to the level of equality around that year, plausibly because of less redistribution. Copyright 1999 by Kluwer Academic Publishers

Date: 1999
View citations in EconPapers

Downloads: (external link)
http://journals.kluweronline.com/issn/0048-5829/contents link to full text (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kap:pubcho:v:100:y:1999:i:3-4:p:203-23

Access Statistics for this article

Public Choice is edited by Charles K. Rowley, WIlliam F. Shughart and Robert D. Tollison

More articles in Public Choice from Springer
Series data maintained by Christopher F. Baum ().