This paper assesses the evolution of thinking, analysis, and discourse about inequality in the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund since their inception in 1944, on the basis of bibliometric...
The COVID-19 pandemic has brought about massive declines in well-being around the world. This paper seeks to quantify and compare two important components of those losses—increased mortality and higher...
The Gini coefficient of labor earnings in Brazil fell by nearly a fifth between 1995 and 2012, from 0.50 to 0.41. The decline in other measures of earnings inequality was even larger, with the 90-10 percentile...
The authors evaluate the global welfare consequences of increases in mortality and poverty generated by the Covid-19 pandemic. Increases in mortality are measured in terms of the number of years of life...
This paper extends the Becker-Tomes model of intergenerational educational mobility to a rural economy characterized by farm-nonfarm occupational dualism and provides a comparative analysis of rural China...
This paper evaluates the global welfare consequences of increases in mortality and poverty generated by the Covid-19 pandemic. Increases in mortality are measured in terms of the number of years of life...
"Shared prosperity" has become a common phrase in the development policy discourse. This short paper provides its most widely used operational definition -- the growth rate in the average income of the...
The Gini coefficient of labor earnings in Brazil fell by nearly a fifth between 1995 and 2012, from 0.50 to 0.41. The decline in earnings inequality was even larger by other measures, with the 90-10 percentile...
Different episodes of economic growth display widely varying distributional characteristics, both across countries and over time. Growth is sometimes accompanied by rising and sometimes by falling inequality...
In response to a growing interest in comparing inequality levels and trends across countries, several cross-national inequality databases are now available. These databases differ considerably in purpose...
The 2014 release of a new set of purchasing power parity conversion factors (PPPs) for 2011 has prompted a revision of the international poverty line. In order to preserve the integrity of the goalposts...
The 2014 release of a new set of purchasing power parity conversion factors (PPPs) for 2011 has prompted a revision of the international poverty line. In order to preserve the integrity of the goalposts...
Building on earlier work by political philosophers, economists have recently sought to define a concept of equity that accommodates the fairness of reward to individual responsibility and effort, while...
The most severe impact of the Ebola epidemic, which began in Guinea in December 2013 and quickly spread to Liberia and Sierra Leone, has been in lost human lives and suffering. This report, prepared for...
Income differences arise from many sources. While some kinds of inequality, caused by effort differences, might be associated with faster economic growth, other kinds, arising from unequal opportunities...
This paper is organized in following headings: economic development as opportunity equalization; the measurement of educational inequality: achievement and opportunity; economic growth and equality of...
The World Bank Research Observer is intended for anyone who has a professional interest in development. Observer articles are written to be accessible to nonspecialist readers; contributors examine key...
After decades of stagnation, the size of the middle class in Latin America and the Caribbean recently expanded by 50 percent from 103 million people in 2003 to 152 million (or 30 percent of the continent's...
Two related measures of educational inequality are proposed: one for educational achievement and another for educational opportunity. The former is the simple variance (or standard deviation) of test scores...
Widespread agreement that poverty is a multifaceted phenomenon encompassing deprivations in multiple dimensions clashes with the vociferous disagreement about how best to measure these deprivations. Drawing...