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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.

Many individuals start a new firm each year, mainly intending to become independent or improve their financial situation. For most of them, the first years of operations mean a substantial investment of time, effort and money with highly insecure outcomes. This study aims to explore how entrepreneurs running new firms perform financially compared with the established ones and how this situation influences their well-being.

A questionnaire survey was completed in 2021 and 2022 by a representative sample of N = 1136 solo self-employed and microentrepreneurs in the Czech Republic, with dependent self-employed excluded. This study used multiple regressions for data analysis.

Early-stage entrepreneurs are less satisfied with their financial situation, have lower disposable income and report more significant financial problems than their established counterparts. The situation is even worse for the subsample of startups. However, this study also finds they do not have lower well-being than established entrepreneurs. While a worse financial situation is generally negatively related to well-being, being a startup founder moderates this link. Startup founders can maintain a good level of well-being even in financial struggles.

The results suggest that policies should focus on reducing the costs related to start-up activities. Further, policy support should not be restricted to new technological firms. Startups from all fields should be eligible to receive support, provided that they meet the milestones of their development. For entrepreneurship education, this study‘s results support action-oriented approaches that help build entrepreneurs’ self-efficacy while making them aware of cognitive biases common in entrepreneurship. This study also underscores that effectuation or lean startup approaches help entrepreneurs develop their startups efficiently and not deprive themselves of resources because of their unjustified overconfidence.

This study contributes to a better understanding of the financial situation and well-being of founders of new firms and, specifically, startups. The personal financial situation of startup founders has been a largely underexplored issue. Compared with other entrepreneurs, this study finds that startup founders are, as individuals, in the worst financial situation. Their well-being remains, however, on a comparable level with that of other entrepreneurs.

In response to the pandemic, the Korean government introduced fiscal measures: including the Emergency Disaster Relief Funds which is the first-ever universal benefit in Korea. This paper identifies the effects of the measures on poverty, household income and household consumption expenditure under the disproportionate effect of the pandemic.

This study analysed the Korea Household Income and Expenditure Survey (KHIES) with Changes-in-Changes at five percentiles (5, 25, 50, 75 and 95%) instead of Difference-in-Differences (DD) because the parallel trends assumption of DD cannot be investigated due to the recent KHIES redesign. In addition, it also exmined the effects on vulnerable groups (e.g. female, elderly and young households).

COVID-19 has had prompt and disproportionate effects on the vulnerable, such as low-income, female and elderly households. However, the government measures had a limited effect. First, the measures could not mitigate the initial income reduction and only had temporary positive effects on income and consumption expenditure. Second, young households tended to save the relief instead of present consumption. Lastly, education disparity was observed at 25 and 50%. Therefore, this study suggests that response measures need to be sustainable and concentrated on the vulnerable.

A large literature estimated effects on either household income or household consumption expenditure, and focused on macroeconomic indices (e.g. marginal propensity to consumption). This study analysed both income (poverty) and consumption expenditure and found policy implications for better welfare system in an economic downturn.

The authors aim to demonstrate the impact of allowing for unequal intra-household distribution of resources on income poverty and income inequality.

The paper applies a collective consumption model to study the intra-household distribution of resources in Visegrád countries (V4). It utilises subjective financial satisfaction as a proxy for indirect utility from individual consumption to estimate the indifference scales within couples instead of the traditional equivalence scale. The European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) 2013 and 2018 data are applied.

This study’s results indicate substantial economies of scale from living in a couple that are generally higher than implied by the commonly applied equivalence scale. The sharing rule estimates suggest that at the mean of distribution factors, women receive a consumption share between 0.4 and 0.6; however, some of the results are close to an equal sharing of 0.5. The female consumption share rises with her contribution to household income. Regarding income poverty and inequality, the authors show that both these measures might be underestimated in the traditional approach to equal sharing of resources.

The authors add to the empirics by estimating indifference scales for Czechia (CZ), Hungary (HU), Poland (PL) and Slovakia (SK), countries that have not been involved in previous research.

The purpose of this paper is to know the relevance between the changes in non-taxable income with the receipt of Income Tax Article 21, Income Tax Article 25/29, the receipt of value added tax and the receipt of luxury sales tax r (PPnBM).

Changes in non-taxable income have potentially reduced the receipt of Income Tax Article 21, Income Tax Article 25/29 of individual taxpayers, otherwise it increased value added tax and luxury sales tax receipts. This study used the descriptive qualitative approach, by conducting a simple case study based on actual data. Data analysis technique used is descriptive statistics and comparison analysis. Research conducted at the Kantor Wilayah Direktorat Jenderal Pajak Jawa Timur II.

The results show that the changes of non-taxable income in 2013 and 2015 did not affect the receipt of Income Tax Article 21 but the growth is slowed, while the receipt of Income Tax Article 25/29 increased.

Value added tax and luxury sales tax receipts, increasing every year, slowed down in 2013, but increased higher in 2015.

The purpose of this paper is to empirically explore the financial well-being (FWB) of Malaysian households and to construct a subjective FWB index with present and future time perspectives.

Data were collected from 1,867 respondents across five major regions in Malaysia. Adapting the InCharge Financial Distress/Financial Well-being (IFDFW) Scale by Prawitz et al. (2006) and the method of computing an index by Devlin (2009), this study develops an FWB index using subjective measures that include future time perspectives (retirement). The index was employed to measure the FWB across low-, middle- and high-income groups and socio-demographic characteristics.

This study finds evidence that Malaysians' FWB is at an average level (46.8). Middle-income households' FWB (46.1) flanks between the financial well-being index (FWBI) levels of the low-income (37.4) and high-income households (58.7). Across age groups, education levels and employment sectors, the FWB of Malaysians significantly varies, although not across different ethnics, religions, zones and residential areas. Overall, the results suggest that the detrimental effects of FWB are perceived by all Malaysian households nationwide regardless of their religion, ethnicity and residential areas.

The results of this study complement the other well-being indices used by policymakers and may serve as a useful input for government and policymakers for them to formulate appropriate strategies to promote higher FWB of Malaysian households based on their socio-demographic characteristics.

This study used primary data and developed a subjective FWB index that leverages on people's perceptions of their own financial well-being while including present and future time perspectives. The main contribution of this paper is to construct an index that is easily interpretable and that complements the existing FWB indices, and to identify the segments of society that have low vis-à-vis high FWB.

This paper aims to test two hypotheses related to the supposedly negative impact of rent control on residential mobility: the mobility of renters is, first, negatively related to how attractive their residential areas are and, second, relatively high for renters living in properties built after 2005.

This paper estimates logit and multinomial logit regressions and models household moves. The multinomial logit regressions separate between short- and long-distance moves and between moves to rentals and to owned dwellings. This paper uses the “relative income” of the tenants’ residential areas to proxy area attractiveness. This paper estimates regressions for entire Sweden and the three largest “commuting” regions and municipalities, respectively.

The full sample provides support of both hypotheses in all regressions. Hypothesis one gets stronger support for moves to other rentals than moves to owned dwellings but about equally strong support for short- and long-distance moves. Hypothesis one obtains strongest support in Gothenburg municipality while hypothesis two obtains strongest support in the Malmö region. Also, hypothesis two obtains stronger support for short-distance moves than long-distance moves and slightly stronger support for moves to owned dwellings than those to rented dwellings.

This paper does not estimate “how much” rent control affects mobility, and results cannot be used to design specific rent setting policies. Results may be sensitive to how different types of moves are defined.

Efforts to reform rent setting policies in Sweden are encouraged.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this paper’s two hypotheses are not tested before in Sweden and can be tested without control groups.