The Ricardian Vice: Why Sala-i-Martin’s calculations of world income inequality are wrong

Branko Milanovic ()

HEW from EconWPA

Abstract: The paper discusses recent world income inequality calculations by Sala- i-Martin. It shows that the two main problems with which the author had to grapple (too few data to derive countries’ income distributions, and sparseness of such data in time) are not solved in a satisfactory fashion. They, and several other simplifying assumptions, make Sala-i- Martin results very dubious. We argue that Sala-i-Martin has ended up by producing a population-weighted inter-national distribution of income augmented by a constant shift parameter and not a distribution of income among world citizens.

Keywords: income inequality; world; globalization (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D31 I3 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev
Date: 2003-05-09
Note: Type of Document - pdf; prepared on IBM PC - ; to print on HP;
View list of references View citations in EconPapers

Downloads: (external link)
http://129.3.20.41/eps/hew/papers/0305/0305003.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: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wpa:wuwphe:0305003

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in HEW from EconWPA
Series data maintained by EconWPA ().