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Article
Publication date: 9 August 2019

Dale Tweedie and James Hazelton

The purpose of this paper is to encourage and advance interdisciplinary accounting research on economic inequality.

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Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to encourage and advance interdisciplinary accounting research on economic inequality.

Design/methodology/approach

The authors review prior research into economic inequality, including two new papers in this issue, to identify topics where economic inequality and accounting research intersect. The authors then draw on prior accounting research to identify frameworks accounting scholars already use apposite to analysing these topics.

Findings

Economic inequality cuts across major accounting topics, including measurement, reporting and tax. Inequality also bears on an influential agenda in interdisciplinary accounting research to hold corporations and states accountable for their impacts. Four prior research frameworks accounting scholars might apply to this agenda are: critical Marxian or post-Marxian; accounting ethics; advocacy; and disclosure studies.

Social implications

A growing body of social scientific research, as well as influential global institutions, social movements and political debates, raise concerns over inequitable global distributions of wealth and income. The authors explore ways accounting scholars can help redress these inequities.

Originality/value

While economic inequality affects billions of people, accounting scholarship is yet to give these inequities the attention their scale and social impact merits. The authors suggest ways accounting researchers can make substantive contributions to addressing this issue.

Details

Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal, vol. 32 no. 7
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0951-3574

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 17 September 2019

Peter Skilling and Helen Tregidga

The purpose of this paper is to analyse justifications for, and accounting’s role in, arguments for and against the living wage.

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Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to analyse justifications for, and accounting’s role in, arguments for and against the living wage.

Design/methodology/approach

A systematic content analysis of arguments made for and against the living wage in a range of secondary data sources is conducted. Boltanski and Thévenot’s typology of “orders of worth” provides the framework for analysis.

Findings

Arguments for a living wage are found to draw on a range of orders of worth. These arguments hold that while market signals have a valid role in informing wage decisions, such decisions should also take into account the civic order’s emphasis on collective outcomes, the industrial order’s emphasis on long-term organisational performance, and an emphasis on the inherent dignity of the human worker drawn from the domestic and inspired orders. Business arguments against a living wage hold that the current weight given to the tests and objectives of the market order is optimal and that a living wage would undermine firm competitiveness and, ultimately, collective well-being. Justifications of existing low-wage practices are shown to be reflected in, and naturalised by, accounting discourses and practices.

Originality/value

This study contributes to the emergent literature on the relationship between accounting and inequality. It elucidates accounting’s role in supporting the market order of worth and thus the stabilisation and perpetuation of income inequalities. Its analysis of the orders of worth invoked by those calling for a living wage contribute to the task of imagining and constructing an alternative, more equitable, accounting discourse and practice.

Details

Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal, vol. 32 no. 7
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0951-3574

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 1 December 1998

John Creedy

This paper uses a lifetime income simulation model to examine the effects on inequality and progressivity of extending the time period over which income is measured. The income…

4237

Abstract

This paper uses a lifetime income simulation model to examine the effects on inequality and progressivity of extending the time period over which income is measured. The income tax schedule typically displays increasing marginal rates, and there is a substantial amount of relative income mobility, along with a systematic variation in average incomes over the life cycle of the cohort. Simulations show that progressivity and inequality measures can often move in opposite directions, both over time for annual accounting periods, and as the length of period is gradually increased. The relationship between summary measures is complicated by the role of the aggregate tax ratio, in addition to the re‐ranking that can occur in the larger period framework. Some tax structures are found to increase in progressivity, while others show less progressivity, as the time period increases. Re‐ranking is found to increase as the accounting period increases: it is higher and increases more rapidly as the accounting period is increased for tax structures displaying more steeply rising rate structures.

Details

Journal of Economic Studies, vol. 25 no. 6
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0144-3585

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 29 April 2021

Jane Andrew, Max Baker and James Guthrie

The authors explore the Australian Government's implementation of budgetary measures to manage the social and economic impacts of COVID-19, paying particular attention to how the…

4215

Abstract

Purpose

The authors explore the Australian Government's implementation of budgetary measures to manage the social and economic impacts of COVID-19, paying particular attention to how the country's history of inequality has shaped these actions, and the effect inequality may have on outcomes.

Design/methodology/approach

In this qualitative case study of public budgeting, the authors draw on the latest research into inequality to consider the implications of policy responses to COVID-19 in Australia. In particular, we examine the short-term introduction of what we term “people-focused” budgetary measures. These appeared contrary to the dominant neoliberalist approach to Australian welfare policymaking.

Findings

This paper foregrounds the relationship between budgeting, public policy and inequality and explores how decades of increasingly regressive tax systems and stagnating living wages have made both people, and the state, vulnerable to crises like COVID.

Social implications

There is still much to learn about the role of accounting in the shaping of growing economic inequality. In focusing on public budgeting within the context of COVID, the authors suggest ways accounting researchers can contribute to our understanding of economic inequality, both in terms of drivers and consequences. The authors hope to contribute to a growing body of accounting research that can influence social movements, political debates and policymaking, while also raising awareness of the consequences of wealth and income inequality.

Originality/value

The authors explore ways accounting scholars might help articulate a post-COVID future that avoids recreating the inequalities of the past and present.

Details

Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal, vol. 34 no. 6
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0951-3574

Keywords

Book part
Publication date: 20 June 2003

Gary S. Fields

This paper devises a new method for using the information contained in income-generating equations to “account for” or “decompose” the level of income inequality in a country and…

Abstract

This paper devises a new method for using the information contained in income-generating equations to “account for” or “decompose” the level of income inequality in a country and its change over time. In the levels decomposition, the shares attributed to each explanatory factor are independent of the particular inequality measure used. In the change decomposition, methods are presented to break down the contribution of each explanatory factor into a coefficients effect, a correlation effect, and a standard deviation effect. In an application to rising earnings inequality in the United States, it is found that schooling is the single most explanatory variable, only one other variable (occupation) has any appreciable role to play, and all of schooling’s effect was a coefficients effect.

Details

Worker Well-Being and Public Policy
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-84950-213-9

Book part
Publication date: 27 October 2020

Candy Chamorro González, Ruth Alejandra Patiño Jacinto and Lisseth Vásquez Peñaloza

The entry of women in accounting has been established with great effort; however, it has been achieved thanks to the academic and research leadership that has enabled…

Abstract

The entry of women in accounting has been established with great effort; however, it has been achieved thanks to the academic and research leadership that has enabled incorporation into different areas in the profession. In this context, this study seeks to identify the presence of women in academic accounting spaces in Colombia. The study analyzes the field of research from the perspective of women in the development of accounting. The methodology is qualitative, based in a case study through semi-structured interviews to establish women’s experiences, barriers and perspectives within the accounting academic and research field in Colombia. The main result is that though there is headway being made, there are also gaps for women’s participation in Colombia. This is supported by research which indicates that this situation is similar in multiple contexts. It is considered essential to integrate diverse perspectives and disciplines that contribute to the transformation of the structure of domination and elimination of barriers for women in the accounting discipline.

Details

Resistance and Accountability
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-83867-993-4

Keywords

Content available
Book part
Publication date: 25 January 2023

Petra Sauer, Narasimha D. Rao and Shonali Pachauri

In large parts of the world, income inequality has been rising in recent decades. Other regions have experienced declining trends in income inequality. This raises the question of…

Abstract

In large parts of the world, income inequality has been rising in recent decades. Other regions have experienced declining trends in income inequality. This raises the question of which mechanisms underlie contrasting observed trends in income inequality around the globe. To address this research question in an empirical analysis at the aggregate level, we examine a global sample of 73 countries between 1981 and 2010, studying a broad set of drivers to investigate their interaction and influence on income inequality. Within this broad approach, we are interested in the heterogeneity of income inequality determinants across world regions and along the income distribution. Our findings indicate the existence of a small set of systematic drivers across the global sample of countries. Declining labour income shares and increasing imports from high-income countries significantly contribute to increasing income inequality, while taxation and imports from low-income countries exert countervailing effects. Our study reveals the region-specific impacts of technological change, financial globalisation, domestic financial deepening and public social spending. Most importantly, we do not find systematic evidence of education’s equalising effect across high- and low-income countries. Our results are largely robust to changing the underlying sources of income Ginis, but looking at different segments of income distribution reveals heterogeneous effects.

Details

Mobility and Inequality Trends
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-80382-901-2

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 18 January 2013

Indunil De Silva

The purpose of this paper is to decompose inequality in Sri Lanka by population subgroups and income sources.

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Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to decompose inequality in Sri Lanka by population subgroups and income sources.

Design/methodology/approach

The study is based on the latest Sri Lankan Household Income and Expenditure Survey. The study firstly sketches an inequality profile for Sri Lanka and then investigates the principle components of inequality by applying several decomposition techniques. Essentially a decomposable class of inequality measures were computed by considering households characteristics such as geographic location/sector, gender, education and type of employment. Inequality within and between population subgroups/sectors in the distribution of expenditure was done by employing the Theil's entropy index, mean logarithmic deviation, and the half the squared coefficient of variation. Concentration curves and indices were utilized to decompose inequality by expenditure components.

Findings

The empirical findings are broadly encouraging. Decomposition analysis results reveal that in all groups used, the between‐group inequality accounts only for a very small part of the overall inequality. Thus, reducing inequality between the household groups would have only limited effect on reducing the overall inequality. Results confirm the fact that inequality in Sri Lanka was driven by relatively higher levels of expenditure inequalities of those at the top of the expenditure distribution. Decomposition estimates of the Gini index by expenditure sources via Rao's method revealed that the distribution of non‐food expenditure was more asymmetric as compared to food expenditure. Findings in general point to the wisdom of considering the redistribution of economic resources within‐sectors and sub‐groups rather than between‐sectors and sub‐groups if the intention is to cost effectively reduce overall inequalities in Sri Lanka. However, in practice an optimal‐mix of within and between‐group policies would be required in addressing overall inequality.

Originality/value

This is the first study that analyzes the latest Sri Lankan Household Income and Expenditure Survey to decompose inequality by population subgroups and income sources.

Details

Journal of Economic Studies, vol. 40 no. 1
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0144-3585

Keywords

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