Documents social inequality 1 477 results

"In the 2000s, global inequality fell for the first time since the Industrial Revolution, driven by a decline in the dispersion of average incomes across countries. Between 1988 and 2008, a period of rapidly increasing global integration, income growth was largest for the global top 1 percent and for country-deciles in Asia, often in the upper halves of the national distributions, while the poorer deciles in rich countries lagged behind. Although within-country inequality increased in population-weighted terms, for the average developing country the rise in inequality slowed down in the second half of the 2000s. However, like any analysis based on household surveys, these results could miss important increases in inequality if they are concentrated at the top. These data constraints remain especially serious in developing countries where only very limited information on the top tail exists, especially regarding capital incomes."

"Behavioural sciences help refine our understanding of human decision-making. Their insights are immensely relevant for policy-making since public intervention works much better when it targets real people rather than imaginary beings assumed to be perfectly rational. Increasingly, governments around the world are keen to rely on those insights for reshaping public interventions in a wide range of policy areas such as energy, health, financial services and data protection. When policy-making meets behavioural sciences, effective and low-cost regulations can emerge in the form of default rules, smart disclosure and simplification requirements. While behaviourally-informed intervention has a huge potential for policymaking, it also attracts legitimacy and practicability concerns. Nudge and the Law takes a European perspective on those issues and explores the legal implications of the emergent phenomenon of behavioural regulation by focusing on the challenges and opportunities it may offer to EU policy-making and beyond."

"Due to behavioral effects triggered by redistributional interventions, it is still an open question whether government policies are able to effectively reduce income inequality. We contribute to this research question by using different country-level data sources to study inequality trends in OECD countries since 1980. We first investigate the development of inequality over time before analyzing the question of whether governments can effectively reduce inequality. Different identication strategies, using fixed effects and instrumental variables models, provide some evidence that governments are capable of reducing income inequality despite countervailing behavioral responses. The effect is stronger for social expenditure policies than for progressive taxation."

"La crise écologique et financière oblige les décideurs à se pencher sur les scénarios de sortie de crise verte. Mais cette prise de conscience court le risque de s'arrêter à mi-chemin. « Capitalisme vert », « croissance verte », « keynésianisme vert » et « technologies propres » constituent autant de confortables mirages destinés à nous épargner les nécessaires remises en cause liées aux limites écologiques d'une planète aux ressources finies. La prise en compte conséquente de ces limites amène à aborder de front la question des inégalités écologiques et sociales et à changer les modes de production, de consommation et donc les modes de vie les plus prédateurs. Sans autre échappatoire, dans cette redistribution des richesses à opérer, que la redéfinition collective du sens de ces richesses elles-mêmes."

"There is a widespread belief that the COVID-19 pandemic has increased global income inequality, reducing per capita incomes by more in poor countries than in rich. This supposition is reasonable but false. Rich countries have experienced more deaths per head than have poor countries; their better health systems, higher incomes, more capable governments and better preparedness notwithstanding. The US did worse than some rich countries, but better than several others. Countries with more deaths saw larger declines in income. There was thus not only no trade-off between lives and income; fewer deaths meant more income. As a result, per capita incomes fell by more in higher-income countries. Country by country, international income inequality decreased. When countries are weighted by population, international income inequality increased, not because the poorest countries diverged from the richest countries, but because China—no longer a poor country—had few deaths and positive economic growth, pulling it away from poor countries. That these findings are a result of the pandemic is supported by comparing global inequality using IMF forecasts in October 2019 and October 2020."

"What do we want from economic growth? What sort of a society are we aiming for? In everyday economics, there is no such thing as enough, or too much, growth. Yet in the world's most developed countries, growth has already brought unrivalled prosperity: we have `arrived'. More than that, through debt, inequality, climate change and fractured politics, the fruits of growth may rot before everyone has a chance to enjoy them. It's high time to ask where progress is taking us, and are we nearly there yet?
In fact, Trebeck and Williams claim in this ground-breaking book, the challenge is now to make ourselves at home with this wealth, to ensure, in the interests of equality, that everyone is included. They explore the possibility of `Arrival', urging us to move from enlarging the economy to improving it, and the benefits this would bring for all."

"This report focuses on the social and economic resilience that might be achieved by well-designed and well-targeted investment in education. It provides a review of the individual and social returns of education in terms of both economic and non-economic effects. The most important economic benefits for individuals include better skills, better employability, increased productivity and higher earnings. Among the non-economic benefits associated with education are better health, lower crime rates and higher levels of trust, tolerance, and civic and political engagement. At the societal level, the most relevant returns from education are associated with higher GDP growth, better diffusion and adoption of technologies, higher innovation capacity, stable public finances and better social cohesion. We show that European countries, which are endowed with better education, both in terms of quantity and quality, recover faster from economic shocks and have better economic resilience. We also provide evidence that individuals who are more educated are more flexible and adaptable to new technological advances, and we discuss the specific skills that are expected to be most in demand in the future. We point out that access to high-quality preschool education for disadvantaged children is one of the most important policies to tackle existing inequalities within a society. The report also discusses the implications of the Covid-19 related school lockdowns in early 2020 on individuals (students, teachers and parents), educational institutions and systems, and suggests that if not tackled adequately during the recovery stage, the immediate adverse consequences – such as interrupted learning and skills formation, exacerbated educational inequalities and rising dropout rates – could lead to high social and economic costs in the long term."

"This paper uses an individual-level survey conducted by the Edelman Trust Barometer in mid-April for 11 advanced and emerging market economies to examine perceptions of government performance in managing the health and economic crisis, beliefs about the future, and attitudes about redistribution. We find that women, non-college educated, the unemployed, and those in non-teleworkable jobs systematically have less favorable perceptions of government responses. Personally experiencing illness or job loss caused by the pandemic can shape people's beliefs about the future, heightening uncertainties about prolonged job losses, and the imminent threat from automation. Economic anxieties are amplified in countries that experienced an early surge in infections followed by successful containment, suggesting that negative beliefs can persist. Support for pro-equality redistributive policies varies, depending on personal experiences and views about the poor. However, we find strong willingness to provide social safety nets for vulnerable individuals and firms by those who have a more favorable perception of government responses, suggesting that effective government actions can promote support for redistributive policies."

"Pensamos que vivimos en una edad de oro de la historia y que el progreso va a continuar. Si bien la pandemia del coronavirus de 2020 ha supuesto un terrible contratiempo, y la crisis económica global subsiguiente será muy difícil de superar, seremos capaces de resolverlo. El capitalismo ha generado sin duda progresos materiales enormes. Sin embargo, no ha solucionado, sino que ha agravado, las necesidades básicas de tipo material, sociocultural y espiritual de gran parte de la humanidad. Y es que una concepción ingenua del progreso humano o una visión tecnocientífica demasiado simple no permite valorar adecuadamente el conjunto de la realidad del planeta ni de todos los seres vivos que en él habitan.
Ante un escenario tan difícil y complejo como peligroso, este libro quiere aportar algunas respuestas a temas tan cruciales para la salud y la equidad como la política y la desigualdad, la crisis ecológica y el sistema capitalista, el desempleo y la precarización laboral, la mercantilización sanitaria y la reciente pandemia del coronavirus. Y hace una apuesta decidida por la salud pública, entendida de una manera integral. El futuro de la vida y de la salud están en nuestras mentes y en nuestras manos. La elección es nuestra."

"GDP contractions are typically associated with within-country income inequality increases. While official income inequality data for 2020 will not be available for about two years, the already available employment data for 2020 shows that the difference between highly-educated and low-educated people in terms of job losses is correlated with the economic shock from the COVID-19 pandemic, suggesting that the depth of the economic recession is related to the increase in within-country income inequality in 2020. Scenarios based on historical patterns of recessions and within-country income inequality increases suggest relatively small increases in global income inequality in 2020.

Factors mitigating global inequality increases in 2020 include larger GDP per-capita declines in richer advanced countries than in poorer emerging and developing countries, and the positive GDP growth of China, which suggests that within-country inequality in the world's most populous country might have not changed much in 2020. In contrast, it is quite likely there was a significant increase in European Union income inequality in 2020, partly reversing the decline during the previous decades."