Most of the world's people live in "developing" economies, as do most of the world's poor. The predominant means of economic development is economic growth. In this book Gary Fields asks to what extent and in what circumstances economic growth improves the material standard of living of a country's people. Most development economists agree that economic growth raises the incomes of people in all parts of the income distribution and lowers the poverty rate. At the same time, some groups lose out because of changes accompanying economic growth. Fields examines these beliefs, asking what variables should be measured to determine whether progress is being made and what policies and circumstances cause some countries to do better than others. He also shows how the same data can be interpreted to reach different, even conflicting, conclusions. Using both theoretical and empirical approaches, Fields defines and examines inequality, poverty, income mobility, and economic well-being. Finally, he considers various policies for broad-based growth. Copublished with the Russell Sage Foundation.

An examination of the extent to which economic growth improves the material standard of living of a country's people.

This report provides evidence of a fairly generalised increase in income inequality over the past two decades across OECD countries, but the timing, intensity and causes of the increase differ from what is typically suggested in the media.

In this volume a distinguished team of international contributors consider some of the central long-term issues raised by the problem of income distribution. The Kuznets curve--i.e. the notion that income distribution became increasingly unequal during the period of industrialization, and progressively less unequal during the twentieth century--lies at the center of much of the analysis, and its relevance is discussed in a wide-ranging series of articles covering the British, Belgian, German, Australian, Austrian and American experiences. This volume is the first in many years to take such a broad, comparative approach to income distribution, and makes an important and authoritative contribution to an area of perennial debate.

In this book, a model of long-term interrelationships between income distribution, population growth and economic development is developed and estimated from data for 54 countries. The results indicate that a reduction of income inequality leads to lower fertility and mortality, to improvedbasic needs satisfaction, and to lower labour force participation of young and old males and of females in Asia and Africa. The effect of income distribution on saving and consumption is found to be negligible. These outcomes suggest that family planning and health policies in LDCs will show better results when they are supplemented with policies aimed at makingthe poor benefit from economic growth. As regards development policy, the results indicate that a reduction of income inequality does not impair the formation of physical capital, but enhances the formation of human capital and lowers the growth rate of the labour force.

This is a collection of essays by Simon Kuznets, winner of the 1971 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, published posthumously. It represents the primary concerns of his research at a late phase of his career, as well as themes from his earlier work. The first four chapters deal with 'modern economic growth'. Chapters five to seven introduce the main theme of the remainder of the volume: interrelations between demographic change and income inequality. Chapters eight to ten draw on a wider set of data to make comparisons of income inequality among societies at widely different levels of development. Chapter eleven returns to data for the United States to develop more fully the importance of differing childbearing patterns for income inequality. In the introduction Professor Richard Easterlin discusses the relationship of the essays to the balance of Kuznets's writings. In the afterword Professor Robert Fogel discusses the methodologies favoured by Kuznets.