Development policies and income inequality in selected developing regions, 1980-2010

Giovanni Cornia and Bruno Martorano ()

Working Papers - Economics from Universita' degli Studi di Firenze, Dipartimento di Scienze per l'Economia e l'Impresa

Abstract: The paper discusses the income inequality changes which have taken place in a few representative developing regions during the last 30 years. While inequality rose in the majority of the countries of these regions in the 1980s and 1990s, the last decade was characterized by a bifurcation of inequality trends. This divergence offers the possibility to contrast the experience of virtuous regions (Latin America and parts of East and South-East Asia) and non-virtuous regions (the European economies in transition and China) so as to draw useful lessons. Since the global economic conditions affecting inequality in these countries were not too dissimilar and since no major variations in endogenous factors were evident across the regions analysed, the difference in inequality trends between virtuous and non-virtuous regions was most likely due to institutional factors and public policies. An econometric test confirms that the reduction of inequality is possible even under open economy conditions if a given set of appropriate macroeconomic, labour, fiscal and social policies is adopted by governments.

Keywords: trends in income inequality; factor income distribution; democracy; policy reforms; international economic integration; international crisis; China; South East Asia; Latin America; transition economies of Europe. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D31 E60 I38 J08 P51 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 66 pages
Date: 2013
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev, nep-geo, nep-ltv, nep-sea and nep-tra
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (13)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.disei.unifi.it/upload/sub/pubblicazioni/repec/pdf/wp13_2013.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Development Policies and Income Inequality in Selected Developing Regions, 1980–2010 (2012)
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:frz:wpaper:wp2013_13.rdf

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers - Economics from Universita' degli Studi di Firenze, Dipartimento di Scienze per l'Economia e l'Impresa Via delle Pandette 9 50127 - Firenze - Italy. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Giorgio Ricchiuti ().