Inequality has emerged as a key development challenge. It holds implications for economic growth and redistribution and translates into power asymmetries that can endanger human rights, create conflict, and embed social exclusion and chronic poverty. For these reasons, it underpins intense public and academic debates and has become a dominant policy concern within many countries and in all multilateral agencies. It is at the core of the 17 goals of the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. This book contributes to this important discussion by presenting assessments of the measurement and analysis of global inequality by leading inequality scholars, aligning these to comprehensive reviews of inequality trends in five of the world's largest developing countries - Brazil, China, India, Mexico, and South Africa.

A comprehensive review of evidence on the effect of minimum wages on employment, skills, wage and income distributions, and longer-term labor market outcomes concludes that the minimum wage is not a good policy tool.

Law and Employment analyzes the effects of regulation and deregulation on Latin American labor markets and presents empirically grounded studies of the costs of regulation. Numerous labor regulations that were introduced or reformed in Latin America in the past thirty years have had important economic consequences. Nobel Prize-winning economist James J. Heckman and Carmen Pagés document the behavior of firms attempting to stay in business and be competitive while facing the high costs of complying with these labor laws. They challenge the prevailing view that labor market regulations affect only the distribution of labor incomes and have little or no impact on efficiency or the performance of labor markets. Using new micro-evidence, this volume shows that labor regulations reduce labor market turnover rates and flexibility, promote inequality, and discriminate against marginal workers. Along with in-depth studies of Colombia, Peru, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Jamaica, and Trinidad, Law and Employment provides comparative analysis of Latin American economies against a range of European countries and the United States. The book breaks new ground by quantifying not only the cost of regulation in Latin America, the Caribbean, and in the OECD, but also the broader impact of this regulation.

Belman and Wolfson perform a meta-analysis on scores of published studies on the effects of the minimum wage to determine its impacts on employment, wages, poverty, and more.

This ILO flagship report examines the evolution of real wages around the world, giving a unique picture of wage trends globally and by region. The 2020-21 edition analyses the relationship of minimum wages and inequality, as well as the wage impacts of the COVID-19 crisis. The 2020-21 edition also reviews minimum wage systems across the world and identifies the conditions under which minimum wages can reduce inequality. The report presents comprehensive data on levels of minimum wages, their effectiveness, and the number and characteristics of workers paid at or below the minimum. The report highlights how adequate minimum wages, statutory or negotiated, can play a key role in a human-centred recovery from the crisis

This manual draws on the ILO's comprehensive database containing the principal legal provisions and minimum wage fixing mechanisms in 100 countries. The minimum wage has had a long and turbulent history, and this study sheds light on its intricacies by providing a thorough overview of the institutions and practices in different countries. It outlines the main topics for debate concerning the effects of minimum wages on major social and economic variables such as employment, wage inequality, and poverty. The book considers the various procedures countries use for implementation, including the criteria employed to fix the minimum wage, and how they are linked to specific country objectives. It then measures the efficiency of the minimum wage, and focuses on its impact on employment as a major political issue. For the benefit of non-specialists, the validity of econometric models and their results are examined.