Tag Archives: distribution

Only a short blog post today – in terms of actual researched content. Plenty of announcements and news though, a cartoon, and some great music. I have been meaning to write about the household income and wealth data that the ABS released in July, which showed that real income and wealth growth over a significant period for low income families has been close to zero, while the top 20 per cent have enjoyed rather massive gains. These trends are unsustainable. A nation cannot continually be...

The limitations of AOC-Harris become clearer when you consider what the centerpiece of any meaningful climate policy has to be: suppressing the use of fossil fuels, which will entail putting a steep price on them. (This can be done either with a permit system or taxes, quantity controls or price controls; permits are by far the better option.) We are talking hundreds of dollars per metric ton of carbon, which translates to several dollars per gallon of gas at the pump and similar added...

In the decades following the 1980s, free market policies dominated policy agendas across the world. The gains from growth, however, were not broadly shared within countries, as evidenced by the high levels of economic inequality in the United States and most other advanced economies. In a recent paper, a group of economists at the International Monetary Fund argue for a rethinking of the rules—actual or perceived—that guide economic policies, so that the distributional consequences are...

Trade in intermediates (or ‘unbundling of production') and trade in capital have become increasingly important in last 25 years. This column shows that trade in intermediates generates a reallocation of capital across countries that exacerbates world inequality in both income and welfare. Unbundling of production hurts middle-income countries but helps those with high productivity. Trade in intermediates also increases within-country inequality, and this increase is U-shaped in the...

On Sunday, May 12, 2019, I will be presenting a workshop in London on – Local Government Funding: Challenging the Status Quo. Basically, I will be speaking about the way in which flawed understandings of the capacities of currency-issuing governments, combined with a vicious, ideological attack on working people from a government fully invested in neoliberal transfers to the elites, have ravaged the capacity of local government in the UK to deliver essential public services. See the Events...

Increasing asymmetry of income and wealth, which now goes by the name "inequality" as the buzzword, arises either from the function of perfect markets or from asymmetry of power. A perfect market is one in which there is no asymmetry, that is, the agents are homogenous.A perfect market could generate asymmetry through difference in ability that lead to differences in distribution owing based on merit and just deserts (as conventional economics assumes). However, perfect markets don't exist...

In the specific context of a Green New Deal, the most important demand should be a reduction in working hours, with no offsetting change in wages. That amounts to taking the benefits of increased productivity, and progressive redistribution, in the form of increased leisure rather than increased consumption. It goes along with research findings suggesting that experiences, rather than material goods, are a better source of lasting happiness. To make the argument work completely, we need the...

I am doing some work on the way technology can be chosen to maximise employment in the pursuit of advancing general well-being. This is in the context of some work I am doing on advancing what is known as ‘relative pro-poor growth’ strategies in Africa via employment creation programs and draws on my earlier work in South Africa on the Expanded Public Works Program. In the current work, I have been assessing ways in which the Labour Intensive Public Works program in Ghana has been deployed...

To the early classical economists, this kind of wealth – attained by simply extracting value created by others ­­– was deemed to be unearned, and referred to it as ‘economic rent’. However, ever since neoclassical economics replaced classical economics as the dominant school of thinking in the late 19th century, economic rent has been increasingly marginalised from economic discourse. To the extent that it is acknowledged, it is usually viewed as being peripheral to the story of wealth...

This article combines tax, survey, and national accounts data to estimate the distribution of national income in the United States since 1913. Our distributional national accounts capture 100% of national income, allowing us to compute growth rates for each quantile of the income distribution consistent with macroeconomic growth. We estimate the distribution of both pretax and posttax income, making it possible to provide a comprehensive view of how government redistribution affects...