Does the distribution of income within a country become more equal as it grows richer? This paper uses plausibly exogenous variations in trade-weighted world income and international oil price shocks as instruments for within-country variations in countries real GDP per capita to examine this issue for a large sample of advanced and developing countries. Our findings indicate that increases in national income have a significant moderating effect on income inequality: a one percent increase in real GDP per capita, on average, reduces the Gini coefficient by around 0.08 percentage points, a result that is robust across income levels, different time horizons, and alternative estimation techniques. From a policy perspective, our results suggest that education policies that promote equity and help individuals continue on to higher levels of education could help reduce income inequality.

First published in 1961, Kenneth K. Kurihara’s National Income and Economic Growth makes a pioneering effort to integrate national income accounting, income-employment theory and growth analysis as a unified whole. In his belief that growth economics is taught most effectively as a dynamic implication of basic national income theory, Professor Kurihara offers a much fuller treatment of economic growth than most other texts of this genre. The author addresses the complex and pivotal problem of achieving the highest possible rate of growth of real national income while maintaining full employment without inflation, yet the book is confined to the clarification of the technical aspects of the problem. Professor Kurihara endeavours to make allusion to practical application and broad ‘determinants of determinants’ throughout in the varying context of a modern mixed open economy with its dynamic interaction of the private, the public and the foreign trade sectors. The book is intended for intermediate students of macro-economic theory.

Over the past two decades, the percentage of the world’s population living on less than a dollar a day has been cut in half. How much of that improvement is because of—or in spite of—globalization? While anti-globalization activists mount loud critiques and the media report breathlessly on globalization’s perils and promises, economists have largely remained silent, in part because of an entrenched institutional divide between those who study poverty and those who study trade and finance. Globalization and Poverty bridges that gap, bringing together experts on both international trade and poverty to provide a detailed view of the effects of globalization on the poor in developing nations, answering such questions as: Do lower import tariffs improve the lives of the poor? Has increased financial integration led to more or less poverty? How have the poor fared during various currency crises? Does food aid hurt or help the poor? Poverty, the contributors show here, has been used as a popular and convenient catchphrase by parties on both sides of the globalization debate to further their respective arguments. Globalization and Poverty provides the more nuanced understanding necessary to move that debate beyond the slogans.