Growth, Inequality, and Social Welfare: Cross-Country Evidence

David Dollar, Tatjana Kleineberg (tatjana.kleineberg@yale.edu) and Aart Kraay (akraay@worldbank.org)

No 626, LIS Working papers from LIS Cross-National Data Center in Luxembourg

Abstract: We use social welfare functions that assign weights to individuals based on their income levels to document the relative importance of growth and inequality changes for changes in social welfare. In a large panel of industrial and developing countries over the past 40 years, we find that most of the cross-country and over-time variation in changes in social welfare is due to changes in average incomes. In contrast, the changes in inequality observed during this period are on average much smaller than changes in average incomes, are uncorrelated with changes in average incomes, and have contributed relatively little to changes in social welfare.

Pages: 48 pages
Date: 2014-12
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Published in Economic Policy 30, Issue 82 (2015): 335–377. https://doi.org/10.1093/epolic/eiv001.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.lisdatacenter.org/wps/liswps/626.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Growth, inequality and social welfare: cross-country evidence (2015)
Working Paper: Growth, inequality, and social welfare: cross-country evidence (2014)
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:lis:liswps:626

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in LIS Working papers from LIS Cross-National Data Center in Luxembourg Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Piotr Paradowski (publication@lisdatacenter.org).