Free-market institutions and income inequality: Did the link persist around the world even in times of falling within-country inequality, 2000–2021?

Abstract

High or rising economic inequality can exacerbate political inequalities and is plausibly linked with some social harms, such as health problems and declines in happiness and trust. Within-country income inequality increased sharply across most of the world since the 1980s. One prominent critical sociological account of this occurrence points toward institutions of free-market capitalism, or “neoliberalism,” as a key cause that unleashed inequality during the globalization age. This article empirically operationalizes free-market institutions with the use of Fraser Institute’s index of economic freedom and examines the issue with fixed-effects regressions in a novel dataset of 130 countries between the years 2000 and 2021. It finds a substantial positive correlation between the two variables in the developing, though not the developed, world. This finding is robust to a variety of alternative specifications. Moreover, across specifications, modest size of government and freedom of international trade stand out as the two clear components of economic freedom driving the aggregate relationship. Finally, mediation analysis suggests there also exists an indirect ameliorative relationship between economic freedom and inequality through the conduit of economic development.