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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.

Brazil’s regional inequality is an important topic due to the large and persistent differences in development between states and the high levels of inequality in the country. These variations in development can potentially render survey data inaccurate since the significance of capital income varies across the states. Besides, previous studies incorporating tax and national accounts data globally have mainly focused on measuring the income distribution at the country-level. This approach can limit the understanding of inequality, especially when considering large countries such as Brazil.

The methodology used to construct these estimates follows the guidelines of the Distributional National Accounts, whose core goal is to provide income distribution measures consistent with macroeconomic aggregates and harmonized across countries and time. The procedure has three main steps: first, it corrects the survey’s underrepresentation of top incomes using tax data. Then, it accounts for national income items not included in the survey or tax data, such as imputed rents and undistributed profits. Finally, it ensures that all components match the national income.

Compared to survey-based estimations, the results reveal a new angle on the state-level inequality. This study indicates that Amazonas, Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo have a more concentrated income distribution. The top 1\% of earners in these states receives around 28\% of total pre-tax income, while the top 10\% receive nearly 60\%. On the other end, Amapá (AP), Acre (AC), Rondônia (RO) and Santa Catarina (SC) are the states where the income distribution is less concentrated. There were no significant changes in the income distribution across the states during the period analyzed.

This study combines survey, tax and national accounts data to construct new estimates of Brazil’s state-level income distribution from 2006 to 2019. Previous results only considered income captured in surveys, which usually misses a significant part of capital incomes. This limitation may bias comparisons as capital income has different importance across the states. The new estimates represent the income of top groups more accurately, account for the entire national income and enable to compare regional inequality levels consistently with other countries.

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.

As an essential part of mainstream Western development economics, the trickle-down theory originates from the behavioral choices and iterations of thought on conflicts of interest in the evolution of remuneration structure in Western countries. The fundamental flaw of the logic of this theory is that it conceals the inherent implication of social systems and the essential characteristics of social structures.

This paper examines the relationships among economic growth, income distribution and poverty from the perspective of social relations of production – the nature of production relations determines the nature of distribution relations and further determines the essence of trickle-down development, and ownership is the core mechanism for realizing the trickle-down effect.

The stagnation or smoothness of the trickle-down effect in different economies is essentially subject to the logic of “development for whom”, which is determined by ownership relationship.

To be more specific, “development for capitalists” and “development for the people” indicate two distinctly different economic growth paths. The former starts with private ownership and follows a bottom-up negative trickle-down path that inevitably leads to polarization, while the latter starts with public ownership and follows a top-down positive trickle-down path that will lead to common prosperity in the end.

The neo-Kaleckian model follows the ideas of Marx, Keynes and Kalecki, that investment is a key influencing factor in the dynamics of the capitalist mode of production. Through the discussion of different forms of investment decision function, this paper constructs the analysis framework of wage-led and profit-led economic growth regimes.

The model has become an important theoretical paradigm for current Western heterodox economists regarding the research on the impact of functional income distribution on economic growth, and it has a very large impact on both theoretical and empirical research. Starting from Marx's reproduction theory, this article discusses the theoretical shortcomings of the neo-Kaleckian growth regime model.

This paper mainly focuses on three aspects: (1) the ideological legacy of “Smith's Dogma”; (2) neglecting the restrictions on income distribution from the organic composition of capital and the surplus value rate; (3) technological progress and the formation of a new long economic wave.

The authors believe that the neo-Kaleckian model unilaterally emphasizes the demand-side factors in the economy and, unconsciously or not, ignores the role of the supply-side, which makes it encounter certain limitations in explaining long-term growth. Even if some empirical conclusions are employed to bridge functional income distribution and technological progress, there is still a lack of a theoretical basis for accurately describing long-term economic changes using this model. In order to better promote high-quality economic development and accelerate the formation of a new pattern of economic development in which the domestic large-scale cycle is the mainstay and the domestic and international double cycles promote each other, the authors need to adopt a policy combination with the supply-side as the main and the demand-side as the supplement, and to work from both sides.

This paper places what has happened to income inequality in rich countries over recent decades alongside trends in median and low incomes in real terms, taken as incomplete but valuable indicators of the evolution of living standards for “ordinary working families” and the poor. The findings demonstrate first just how varied country experiences have been, with some much more successful than others in generating rising real incomes around the middle and toward the bottom of the distribution. This variation is seen to be only modestly related to the extent to which income inequality rose, which itself is more varied across the rich countries than is often appreciated. The extent to which economic growth is transmitted to the middle and lower parts of the distribution is seen to depend on a range of factors of which inequality is only one. Sources of real income growth around the middle have also varied across countries, though transfers are consistently key toward the bottom. The diversity of rich country experiences should serve as an important corrective to a now-common “grand narrative” about inequality and stagnation based on the experience of the USA.

Tourism has grown to be one of the world's largest and fastest-growing economic industries. Tourism development is viewed as a tool to improve income distribution as it allows people at the bottom of the pyramid to get involved in the industry. This study aims to examine the impact of tourism on income inequality in the top income equality countries.

The paper employs fully modified ordinary least squares (FMOLS) and dynamic ordinary least squares techniques to investigate the dynamic impact of tourism on income inequality in the world's most income equality countries, from 2001 to 2016.

The result shows that tourism is one of the major drivers of income equality. Thus, tourism can be used to reduce a country's income disparity.

As a result, policymakers should support the tourism industry to reduce income disparity and enhance income distribution.

Given the conflicting findings in the literature, this study reexamines this link and attempts to backwardly assess if the top equal-income countries in the world are heavily dependent on tourism.

This study aims to investigate the effect of smoking on the income of workers in the Brazilian labor market.

Using data from the 2019 National Health Survey (PNS), we initially address the sample selection bias concerning labor market participation by using the Heckman (1979) method. Subsequently, the decomposition of income between smokers and nonsmokers is analyzed, both on average and across the earnings distribution by employing the procedure of Firpo, Fortin, and Lemieux (2009) - FFL decomposition. Ñopo (2008) technique is also used to obtain more robust estimates.

Overall, the findings indicate an income penalty for smokers in the Brazilian labor market across both the average and all quantiles of the income distribution. Notably, the most significant differentials and income penalties against smokers are observed in the lower quantiles of the distribution. Conversely, in the higher quantiles, there is a tendency toward a smaller magnitude of this gap, with limited evidence of an income penalty associated with this habit.

This study presents an important limitation, which refers to a restriction of the PNS (2019), which does not provide information about some subjective factors that also tend to influence the levels of labor income, such as the level of effort and specific ability of each worker, whether smokers or not, something that could also, in some way, be related to some latent individual predisposition that would influence the choice of smoking.

The relevance of the present study is clear in identifying the heterogeneity of the income gap in favor of nonsmokers, as in the lower quantiles there was a greater magnitude of differentials against smokers and a greater incidence of unexplained penalties in the income of these workers, while in the higher quantiles, there was low magnitude of the differentials and little evidence that there is a penalty in earnings since the worker is a smoker.

This study analyses income inequality and distribution patterns among key actors in the cassava value chain. The study also identifies factors that influence profit of key actors in the cassava value chain.

The study was conducted in Oyo State, Nigeria, using primary data from 620 actors, consisting of 400 farmers, 120 processors and 100 traders in the cassava value chain. The Gini coefficient was used to estimate income inequalities within and between actors. Multiple linear regression was applied to identify factors that influence the profit of the actors in the cassava value chain.

The result shows a gender pattern in the participation in the cassava value chain: men dominate in the production, whereas women mostly engage in processing and marketing of processed cassava products. We also find that incomes are unequally distributed among actors, favouring traders and processors more than farmers in the value chain. Women are better off in processing and trading of value-added products than in the raw cassava production. Spatial differences also contribute to income inequality among farmers in the cassava value chain. An increase in farmers and processors’ incomes reduces inequality in the value chain while an increase in traders’ income widens inequality. Age is significantly negatively correlated with actors’ profit at 1%, while educational level significantly increases their profit at 5%. Processors and traders with large households have a higher profit. We also find that farm size, experience and labour input have significant positive effects on farmers’ profit only at 5%. Membership in an association increases farmers and processors’ profit at 1 and 10%, respectively.

The study recommends that agricultural policies that promote agrifood value chains should aim at minimizing income inequality by targeting vulnerable groups, particularly female farmers to achieve sustainable development in rural communities.

Existing studies recognise income inequality in agricultural value chains in sub-Saharan Africa. However, there are few rigorous quantitative studies that address this pressing issue. Our paper fills this knowledge gap and suggests ways to minimise income inequality in the agri-food value chain, using the example of the cassava value chain in Nigeria.

The purpose of this paper is further leveraging the advantages of the basic socialist economic system and exploring the realistic way of transforming the advantages of the socialist economic system with Chinese characteristics into governance efficacy. At its Fourth Plenary Session, the 19th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC) elevated the socialist market economy system to China's basic economic system, further affirming the significant advantages embedded in the socialist market economy from an institutional perspective.

The essence of the basic socialist economic system consists of the ownership structure with public ownership as the mainstay, the income distribution system with distribution according to work as the mainstay and the socialist market economy, which are interrelated, supportive and reinforcing mutually, forming an organic whole.

Over the past 40 years of reform and opening-up, it has been proven through practice that the basic socialist economic system has played a fundamental role in guaranteeing rapid economic development and social stability. The system not only corresponds to the development level of the productive forces in the primary stage of socialism in China but also demonstrates its strengths in eliminating polarization between the poor and the rich and achieving common prosperity.

It is necessary to make the basic economic system more coordinated and consistent and be committed to the philosophy that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts to form a systemic synergy, so as to achieve synergistic enhancement of institutional advantages and governance efficacy.