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Begin New Search Topic Economic Inequality Political Geography Global Focus

1. Gendered laws and women in the workforce

Author:
Marie Hyland, Simeon Djankov, and Pinelopi Koujianou Goldberg
Publication Date:
05-2020
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Peterson Institute for International Economics
Abstract:
This paper provides the first global look at how gender discrimination by the law affects women’s economic opportunity and charts the evolution of legal inequalities over five decades. Using the World Bank’s newly constructed Women, Business and the Law database, it documents large and persistent gender inequalities, especially with regard to pay and treatment of parenthood. The paper finds positive correlations between more equal laws pertaining to women in the workforce and more equal labor market outcomes, such as higher female labor force participation and a smaller wage gap between men and women.
Topic:
Gender Issues, Labor Issues, Women, Inequality, and Economic Inequality
Political Geography:
Global Focus

2. Women scaling the corporate ladder: Progress steady but slow globally

Author:
Soyoung Han and Marcus Noland
Publication Date:
05-2020
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
Peterson Institute for International Economics
Abstract:
Despite steady progress, women remain grossly underrepresented in corporate leadership worldwide. The share of women executive officers and board members increased between 1997 and 2017, but progress was not uniform. Partly in response to gender quotas, the shares of female board members have risen rapidly in some countries while lagging elsewhere. This Policy Brief reports results derived from the financial records of about 62,000 publicly listed firms in 58 economies over 1997–2017, which together account for more than 92 percent of global GDP. The authors conclude that if, as emerging evidence in the literature indicates, gender diversity contributes to superior firm performance, then progress in this area could help boost productivity globally. Policymakers and corporate leaders should consider supportive public and private policies, including more gender-neutral tracking in education, firm protocols that encourage gender balance in hiring and promotion, enforceable antidiscrimination laws, public support for readily available and affordable high-quality childcare and maternity and paternity leave, and quotas.
Topic:
Gender Issues, Women, Economic Inequality, and Private Sector
Political Geography:
Global Focus

3. Inequality in the Twenty-First Century: A Review on Rockstars of the Realm

Author:
Martyna Berenika Linartas
Publication Date:
01-2018
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Postgraduate Program on Sustainable Development and Social Inequalities in the Andean Region (trAndeS)
Abstract:
Not only has been economic inequality on the rise, but also the research agenda on inequality has moved decisively from the fringes to the center of policy and academic interest. This new concern and concentration in respect to this topic, data records, and methodological approaches have given rise to a vast amount of literature. It is for this reason that I review the most important recent works engaging with the origins of economic inequality – a debate which remains highly controversial. The usual categorization to explain the different storytelling – “to be or not to be neoliberal” – seems inappropriate. In this review on “the rockstars of the realm” (Thomas Piketty, Anthony Atkinson, Branko Milanovic and Walter Scheidel), I argue that the question and reason behind different approaches is instead: politics or the economy, which is the master that defines the space for action? The gradually established allegory of “the mirrored hourglass of inequality” illustrates the salience of this cleavage.
Topic:
International Political Economy, Political Economy, Capitalism, Inequality, Neoliberalism, and Economic Inequality
Political Geography:
Global Focus

4. Global Monetary Policy Divergence and the Reemergence of Global Imbalances

Author:
Daniel Gros
Publication Date:
06-2018
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Council on Foreign Relations
Abstract:
Developed economies are paying remarkably little attention to coordinating their monetary policies. This is an unavoidable consequence of the independence of central banks, which faithfully follow their purely domestic mandates except in times of crisis. As a result, global monetary policies have reached unprecedented levels of divergence. This divergence is set to widen—primarily due to differences in the relative strength of labor markets—while global current account imbalances return. Meanwhile, exchange rates have not reacted as economists expected; the dollar has weakened even as policy rates have increased. Economic tensions will likely become more disruptive the longer global imbalances go uncorrected. Likewise, the global economy will become more vulnerable to shocks. Yet by focusing on bilateral trade imbalances, the United States has mistakenly singled out China when the global imbalances between the United States and the eurozone is the more critical issue. The growing global imbalances are reflected more in the eurozone current account surplus and U.S. fiscal policy than in China’s shrinking surplus.
Topic:
International Trade and Finance, Monetary Policy, Exchange Rate Policy, and Economic Inequality
Political Geography:
Global Focus

5. Researching the Killer Fact That Highlighted Global Economic Inequality

Author:
Leila Smith
Publication Date:
12-2016
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Oxfam Publishing
Abstract:
This case study of research in practice describes how in 2014 Oxfam staff researched and developed a powerful killer fact ' that the 85 richest people owned as much wealth as the poorest 3.5 billion people ' and how this triggered international media coverage, political commentary, and record-level website hits.
Topic:
Poverty, Media, Inequality, and Economic Inequality
Political Geography:
Global Focus

6. Core Support for the New Economy

Author:
Neva Goodwin
Publication Date:
06-2016
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Global Development and Environment Institute at Tufts University
Abstract:
This paper proposes an income guarantee that would be defined as compensation for household activities such as childcare, food preparation, care of elderly or ill persons in the home, maintenance of the home and of household vehicles and appliances, and household-based transportation. I will call it Core Support, or CS. The Core Support proposal is put forth as a way to achieve a number of important goals, including reduction of poverty and inequality, increased fairness and better old-age security, and improved possibilities for good child care and education. It could replace much of the burdensome and expensive apparatus of welfare and some other government programs. Rather than providing a handout, it would expressly reward and enable some of the unpaid work on which every society depends, validating these activities as legitimate labor. As described in this proposal, it could have a significant impact in healthy redefinition of gender norms. In addition, the proposed program would reduce the requirement for all members of society to take paid work, thus rebalancing power between employers and employees. By reducing the pressure to create jobs, regardless of their quality or their impact, it would make it easier to cease production of socially or environmentally harmful goods and services. However, it would create a not inconsiderable amount of new work in managing the program. Depending on whether there is too much, or too little, demand for labor in the macroeconomy, this could be desirable, or not. This idea builds on literature on Basic Income Guarantees (BIG), as well as on some work in feminist economics. The latter tends to be skeptical of BIG proposals. It is hoped that the CS proposal, by addressing intra-household allocations – a topic normally absent from BIG proposals – can respond to this skepticism by showing how a basic income system can be designed so as to promote deep cultural changes in gender norms and widen respect for those who do the essential core work of a society. If it is assumed that the CS funds depend on taxable income, then it would be necessary for the economy in which it is implemented to have a preexisting flow of money from the sale of privately produced goods and services; thus it would appear that this approach would not be feasible in poor countries. Hence, given a focus on the U.S. context, some attention will be paid to the question of how “wealthy” this country will be in coming decades. It is possible to imagine macroeconomic conditions in which people are “poor” because they lack money to buy needed goods and services that are in fact being produced in the economy. In this case the central bank could create money to be distributed in amounts that would enable local trade, benefiting both producers and households, and possibly leading to higher levels of output.
Topic:
Gender Issues, Poverty, Women, Inequality, and Economic Inequality
Political Geography:
Global Focus

7. The Rise of the World’s Poorest Countries

Author:
Steven Radelet
Publication Date:
10-2015
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of Democracy
Institution:
National Endowment for Democracy
Abstract:
For more than two decades now, the majority of the world’s poorest countries have been making some of the fastest and biggest development gains in history. The momentous progress achieved since the early 1990s is unprecedented. One-billion people have been lifted out of extreme poverty, the child death rate has been cut in half, life expectancy has increased significantly, millions more girls are enrolled in school, deaths in civil wars have dropped by three-quarters, average incomes have almost doubled, food production has increased by half, and democracy has spread like never before in the world’s poorest countries, notwithstanding with many setbacks, obstacles, and imperfections along the way. Some of these gains—especially the declines in poverty and child mortality—rank among the greatest achievements in human history. Yet few people are aware that this progress is even happening.
Topic:
Poverty, Economic Inequality, Mortality, and Quality of Life
Political Geography:
Global Focus

8. On the Solvency of Nations: Are Global Imbalances Consistent with Intertemporal Budget Constraints?

Author:
Ceyhun Bora Durdu
Publication Date:
06-2009
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System
Abstract:
Theory predicts that a nation's stochastic intertemporal budget constraint is satisfied if net foreign assets (NFA) are integrated of any finite order, or if net exports (NX) and NFA satisfy an error- correction specification with a residual integrated of any finite order. We test these conditions using data for 21 industrial and 29 emerging economies for the 1970-2004 period. The results show that, despite the large global imbalances of recent years, NFA and NX positions are consistent with external solvency. Country-specific unit root tests on NFA-GDP ratios suggest that nearly all of them are integrated of order 1. Pooled Mean Group error-correction estimation yields evidence of a statistically significant, negative response of the NX-GDP ratio to the NFA-GDP ratio that is largely homogeneous across countries.
Topic:
Debt, Budget, Global Financial Crisis, and Economic Inequality
Political Geography:
Global Focus