# Questions tagged [inequality]

Differences in resource allocations or opportunities that arise within or between countries.

112 questions
Filter by
Sorted by
Tagged with
34 views

### An updated version of oxfam top 1% wealth share evolution to 2021

In January 2015 oxfam allegedly published this graph: Q: I'd like to see how that projection held up, by getting the updated data with a comparable methodology. Here is the original document https://...
24 views

35 views

### Lorenz curve extension to 3d?

While thinking about Lorenz curves and economic inequality I wondered if you can extend Lorenz curves to Lorenz surfaces by revolving a Lorenz curve about the line of perfect equality. Would such a ...
48 views

Productivity paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox is the name for the slow productivity growth (i.e. slow GDP growth) of the developed economies despite the robotics, AI, ...
90 views

### Does Singapore's computation of the Gini coefficient exclude low-paid foreign workers?

The Economist (2015-07-16): But Singapore measures its coefficient rather differently, excluding shorter-term foreign workers and non-working families. More generally, how is Singapore's Gini ...
45 views

### Capital/Income Ratio in Pikketty's Capital

In Capital by Thomas Pikketty, https://www.robertdkirkby.com/blog/2015/summary-of-piketty-i/, he states that World War I and World War II were the main reasons why the Capital Income to Labour Income ...
103 views

### Do rich people on average have the vast majority of their wealth invested or they have lots of liquid cash/no productive properties?

I often read about really rich people with billions of dollars, and I'd like to know if they have, for example, just a big part of their wealth in shares of their company or they have lots of wealth ...
49 views

### How much heath expenditure is due to conditions that people are born with?

The CDC says that 90% of US healthcare costs are attributable to chronic conditions. I am interested in an overlapping set of conditions: those that people are born with, including genetic diseases, ...
21 views

### Inequality and recessions

I was reading about Marx's Crisis Theory. On one hand, there is this idea of the falling surplus. But on the other hand, he relates income inequality to the business cycle. Have his ideas regarding ...
290 views

### What does Piketty mean by the C90/C10 ratio?

I am currently readings Piketty's "The Economics of Inequality", where he states in chapter 3: The P90/P10 wage ratio in the United States in the 1990s is 4.5, whereas it is “only” 3.2 in France (...
100 views

### Why is imputed rental income for owner-occupied housing included in the measurement of household income?

In the National Income Dynamics Study in South Africa, total household income is measured by totalling labour income, government income, investment income, capital income, agricultural income, ...
153 views

### Are Open Market Operations a Gift to the .1%?

My Background I was an Economics major a long time ago and I don't work in a related field. I have this question that's been nagging me. I hope somebody can answer the questions at the bottom. ...
104 views

### What do all the distributions that have the same Gini index have in common?

According to the Wikipedia article about Income inequality metrics, Gini index have the next disadvantage: As a disadvantage, the Gini index only maps a number to the properties of a diagram, but the ...
20 views

### What does the vertical axis of the Kuznets curve depict (mathematically)?

I do not understand what does the word "inequality" means on the vertical axis of the Kuznets curve. Can someone please explain?
31 views

### What policies can a government adopt to promote economic equality?

As per the Oxfam survey, Top 1% owns more than the bottom 50% of the population. There is also an enormous wage gap emerging, such as that our average CEO makes something like 200x much more than ...
45 views

### Where is the split in the wealth gap? [closed]

I've been curious where the split in the wealth gap has been over time, and if it was possible to graph it. Put another way, at what net worth is the number of those worth more shrinking in ...
22 views

### Have Raj Chetty's Opportunity Atlas stats changed or been recalculated since early 2019?

During a talk at Google, Raj Chetty said "Fruitvale, in Oakland ... here you see that for black men growing up in low income families in Fruitvale, the average income in adulthood is 5,600 dollars" (...
112 views

### Income/Wealth Inequality; Why does it matter?

I have attempted to answer this question on my own through reading books, blog, and other economic pieces of literature but they all fail to articulate why wealth or income disparities matter. Now ...
58 views

### Combine Gini index with GNI/capita (PPP) to produce an indicator which gives the same weight to low percentile incomes as to high percentile incomes

Consider the attached charts, which illustrate that low-inequality Country A can have both a lower average income and higher average log income than high-inequality Country B. This sparked my interest ...
43 views

### Is Buy Nothing Day a classist protest of Black Friday?

I hope this isn't off topic, it seems specifically economic to me even though it probably intersects with other fields of study. Black Friday is seen as an iconic hallmark of consumerism, and Buy ...
35 views

### Are there any effective research efforts into combating wealth inequality?

There seems to be no "correct" answer in combating wealth inequality; however, we should attempt to use different methods to combat inequality in cities, then counties, then states, then countries. ...
92 views

### Kuhn Tucker Maximization

I have to maximize following expected utility function using Kuhn tucker conditions - Since expected utility function are increasing $C_{1,t}$ and $C_{2,t}$ so constraints (i) and (ii) will hold with ...
35 views

### Data for income distributions

Knowing the average income per capita or the median income is a rather poor economical indicator of a country, even when given in PPP\\$. Knowing the (dimension-less) Gini index is somehow better, but ...
28 views

### What impact does deficit spending have on economic inequality?

Taxation schemes can be classified as progressive (the tax rate is higher for higher income brackets), regressive (the tax rate is lower for higher income brackets), or neutral (the tax rate is the ...
70 views

### Social mobility and income inequality

I once read an argument by the libertarian economist Thomas Sowell against the conventional wisdom that rising income is bad because most statistics which show rising income inequality do not account ...
109 views

### What is the relationship between economic growth and equality?

Does economic growth create more or less equality?
121 views

### Fehr & Schmidt, ultimatum game, inequaltiy aversion, perfect subgame Nash equilibrium

I am preparing for an exam. I have found an old exam but I have no solutions for it, so I tried to solve it, but I dont know if I did it correctly and need therefore your help. The problem looks as ...
2k views

### Why does Denmark have such a huge disparity between its income and wealth Gini coefficients?

(After-transfer) income inequality and wealth inequality are obviously not the same thing, but I would intuitively expect that, all else equal, they would be reasonably well correlated across ...
31 views

### Ideal levels of inequality

Has any work been done to try to figure out what a productive level of wealth and income inequality is in a country? i.e. the minimum to provide incentive for 'hard' work, and necessary risk taking in ...
19 views

### World Inequality Database: Top 10% Income Share U.S. vs. Top 10% Average Income

I want to use the U.S. data from the World Inequality Database for a VAR analysis. However, I am confused as to why the series for the top 10% income share only runs back to 1962, while the series for ...
79 views

### What if price were a function of buyer's income?

If everyone's income were public information, would purely profit-seeking sellers benefit from charging different prices to people based on their different incomes? My intuition says yes because a ...
16 views

### Does PPP measure conversion taken into account government service and taxes?

Apology in advance if this question seems too elementary. I am intrigued by this article I came across,Do We Care About Income Inequality, or Absolute Well-Being? And in the article the author was ...
142 views

### Data Set of Bourguignon and Morrison 2002 AER

This question is about the following paper: F. Bourguignon and C. Morrison "Inequality among World Citizens: 1820-1992", American Economic Review, Vol. 92, No. 4. (Sep., 2002), pp. 727-744. On p.730,...
61 views

### labor share and growth

Is there a link between the level of the labor share and growth? In standard models growth is the rate of (labor augmenting) technical progress and labor force. So does that mean if the labor share ...
24 views

### Is there an income inequality metric which also considers the total income?

I'm trying to compare some data I have about two companies, and in order to do so I need to compare their income inequality, but also to take in consideration the total income of each. For example if ...
49 views

### Has any research found that automation will decrease inequality?

A paper by IMF researchers (but not an official position of the IMF) has found that automation will lead to higher inequality under all scenarios they considered. Even in the scenario where robots ...