Growth, Distribution and Politics

Guido Tabellini and Torsten Persson

No 1991/078, IMF Working Papers from International Monetary Fund

Abstract: We start by arguing that to understand growth differences across countries and time, one needs to understand differences in public policies that affect the incentives for productive accumulation of capital, human capital, or technically useful knowledge. And to understand policy differences one needs to understand how political institutions aggregate conflicting interests into public policies. We then survey some recent work along these lines, which argues that more inequality leads to slower growth. Next, we illustrate some of the basic ideas of this work, by help of a simple model of taxation. We also present some econometric cross-country evidence, which is largely supportive of the basic ideas. We end by suggestions for further work.

Keywords: WP; income; distribution variable; income equality; equilibrium policy; investment rate; income share; share of K.; Income distribution; Personal income; Income inequality; Income tax systems; Consumption; Asia and Pacific; Africa (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 19
Date: 1991-08-01
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/cat/longres.aspx?sk=957 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Growth, distribution and politics (1992)
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:imf:imfwpa:1991/078

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/pubs/ord_info.htm

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IMF Working Papers from International Monetary Fund International Monetary Fund, Washington, DC USA. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Akshay Modi ().