Education and Income Distribution: New Evidence from Cross-country Data

Jose De Gregorio and Jong-Wha Lee

No 55, Documentos de Trabajo from Centro de Economía Aplicada, Universidad de Chile

Abstract: This paper presents empirical evidence on how education is related to income distribution in a panel data set of a broad range of countries for a period between 1960 and 1990. The findings indicate that education factors - higher attainment and more equal distribution of education - play a significant role in making income distribution more equal. The result also confirms the Kuznets inverted-U curve for the relationship between income level and income inequality. We also find that government social expenditure contributes to more equal distribution of income. However, a significant proportion of cross-country and over-time variations of income inequality still remain unexplained. Simulation exercises on income distribution show that growth of income and education on their own cannot make income distribution more equal in the short and medium term.

Date: 1999
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lab, nep-lam and nep-ltv
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (24)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.cea-uchile.cl/wp-content/uploads/doctrab/ASOCFILE120030402115413.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:edj:ceauch:55

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Documentos de Trabajo from Centro de Economía Aplicada, Universidad de Chile Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by (lcanales@dii.uchile.cl).