Inequality and Growth: What Can the Data Say?

Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo

Journal of Economic Growth, 2003, vol. 8, issue 3, 267-99

Abstract: This paper describes the correlations between inequality and the growth rates in cross-country data. Using non-parametric methods, we show that the growth rate is an inverted U-shaped function of net changes in inequality: changes in inequality (in any direction) are associated with reduced growth in the next period. The estimated relationship is robust to variations in control variables and estimation methods. This inverted U-curve is consistent with a simple political economy model but it could also reflect the nature of measurement errors, and, in general, efforts to interpret this evidence causally run into difficult identification problems. We show that this non-linearity is sufficient to explain why previous estimates of the relationship between the level of inequality and growth are so different from one another. Copyright 2003 by Kluwer Academic Publishers

Date: 2003
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (582)

Downloads: (external link)
http://journals.kluweronline.com/issn/1381-4338/contents link to full text (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: Inequality and Growth: What Can the Data Say? (2000)
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:kap:jecgro:v:8:y:2003:i:3:p:267-99

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... th/journal/10887/PS2

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Economic Growth is currently edited by Oded Galor

More articles in Journal of Economic Growth from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().