Inequality, Imbalance, Instability: Reflections on a Structural Crisis

Purpose: The study examines to test asymmetry of income and wealth inequality on GDP growth rate in India during 1995-2023 through NARDL model. Methods: The paper applied Shin et al. (2014) model to estimate asymmetry in NARDL model, applied Dicky and Fuller (1979) model for unit root test, applied Breusch-Pagan model (1979) to test the serial correlation and heteroscedasticity tests. Stability test was done by following Page (1954). Symmetry test was applied by using Wald test (1943). The data on income inequality and wealth inequality were collected from the World Inequality Data Lab and data on GDP growth rate were collected from the World Bank. Results: The paper finds that positive and negative changes of cumulative dynamic multipliers of both income and wealth inequality impact on GDP growth favourably and adversely. Positive and negative responses diverge away from positive and negative long run limits and asymmetry lines of wealth and income inequality have no convergence. Cointegration of wealth and income inequality have negative impacts on GDP growth rate. Conclusion: NARDL model can help policy makers to conduct fiscal and monetary policy and other welfare measures in both short run and long run to ameliorate inequalities towards sustainable GDP growth rate. The model can justify how positive and negative responses of asymmetries in short and long run affect GDP growth.

Recent studies by economists such as Piketty (2013, 2019) and Atkinson (2015) have contested the well-established view that post-war redistribution policies have been successful in the long term at slowing down the rise of structural inequalities. In reality, the claim goes, they have dealt mostly with reducing inequalities of income through redistribution and have left inequalities of wealth and capital ownership uncontrolled. These, according to their studies, have now risen in the developed world and reached levels more typical of 19th Century Europe. To make matters worse, perceptions of and attitudes towards fighting inequalities as unjust that Rawls saw as based on a wide consensus of citizens' "considered judgments" (Rawls, 1999, p. 17), have changed, leading to them being accepted as the justified and even necessary price to pay for economic growth and as a reward for merit. Economic arguments based on the need for incentives for raising productivity and the "trickle-down effect" have become widely accepted as if the price of economic efficiency should be disconnected from the demands of equity. Meritocracy has provided ethical arguments too. As John Roemer says, "today the most important problem for the social sciences of inequality is understanding how electorates have come to acquiesce to policies which increase inequality… and to try revealing the logic of the I would like to thank the editors of the Special Issue on Rawls for inviting me to develop ideas that I first presented in a previous paper published in French in 2016, "L'état-providence face aux inégalités et la démocratie de propriétaires: une comparaison entre Meade, Rawls, Ackerman et Piketty," Tocqueville Review, 2/2016), as well as in another paper in English in 2018: « Self-development and Social Justice ». I hope to be able to develop these ideas in a future book on property-owning democracy and its philosophical justifications.

Reversing extreme economic inequality is one of the grand challenges for social work, identified as one of the most critical issues in the field. Two key types of economic inequality, income and wealth inequality are described. Although, wealth and income inequality are often discussed synonymously they have differing levels of inequality and impact clients’ lives differently. Perhaps more importantly, as this article describes, solving income and wealth inequality require differing solutions. The article further explores the specific income and wealth inequality experienced by women and people of color, due in part to discrimination. Lastly, the efforts of social workers to address economic inequality through research, practice, and advocacy are described.

Inequality has been a major problem facing many countries, with Ghana not being an exception. The enormous problems of inequality have engendered worldwide fight (both physical and intellectual) towards its elimination. Unfortunately , the debate on inequality and its decomposition has often beenbased on income or consumption inequality with little attention onwealth inequality. To get the complete picture of the inequality levels in Ghana, it is appropriate to look at inequality from the wealth angle and then compare the two. Using the Ghana Living Standards Survey of 2006/07 and 2012/13, this study sought to compare the patterns and trends of income and wealth inequality, decompose the Gini coefficient by subgroup and by source, find the marginal effects and then finally look at the effect of economic dependency on income and wealth. The Principal Component Analysis (PCA) was used to calculate the wealth index and the Gini coefficient was used to calculate both wealth and income inequality. The Theil index was used to decompose both income and wealth inequality across all the geographical areas, gender, age, income and asset. The Gini coefficient was further decomposed and their partial derivatives used as marginal effects. The Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) was used to find the effect of economic dependency on income and wealth. Using the Gini coefficient, it was realized that there was a decrease in wealth inequality whereas income inequality increased between 2006 and 2013. However, there were still wide disparities across the geographical areas in terms of either income or household assets. The source component decomposition analyses suggest that income inequality in the urban, rural, male and female have increased over the study period while that of the female has reduced. Asset inequality on the other hand, decreased in the urban but increased around rural, male and female. The study also shows that economic dependency reduces income but increases household assets. This study therefore advocates for policies that will address the needs of the deprived areas through creation of jobs and provision of basic social amenities in order to close the income and the asset inequality gap in Ghana. Keywords: Income, Asset, Inequality, Dependency, Ghana

Winters examines the impact of oligarchic power on Indonesia’s political economy. Defining oligarchs materially, he argues that extreme inequality in wealth among citizens necessarily leads to extreme political inequalities. Central to this approach is the changing politics of wealth defense by oligarchs spanning the Sukarno era, the New Order, and the electoral–democratic period since 1998. He emphasizes that the power of oligarchs in Indonesia is especially dominant and distorting because the country’s legal infrastructure is debilitated, and because organization and mobilization among other actors in civil society is weak. Particular attention is paid to oligarchic influence in Indonesia’s media.

Background Previous research established a positive association between national income inequality and socioeconomic inequalities in adolescent health, but little is known about the extent to which national level inequalities in accumulated financial resources (i.e. wealth) are associated with these health inequalities. Therefore, we examined the association between national wealth inequality and income inequality and socioeconomic inequalities in adolescent mental wellbeing. Methods Data were from 17 countries participating in three successive waves (2010, 2014 and 2018) of the cross-sectional Health Behaviour in School-aged Children (HBSC) study. We combined individual-level data on adolescents' life satisfaction, psychological and somatic symptoms and socioeconomic status (SES) with country-level data on income and wealth inequality (n = 244771). We performed time-series analysis on a pooled sample of 48 country/year groups. Results Higher levels of national wealth inequality were associated with fewer average psychological and somatic symptoms, while higher levels of national income inequality were associated with more psychological and somatic symptoms. No associations between either national wealth inequality or income inequality and life satisfaction were found. Smaller differences in somatic symptoms between higher and lower SES groups were found in countries with higher levels of national wealth inequality. In contrast, larger differences in psychological symptoms and life satisfaction (but not somatic symptoms) between higher and lower SES groups were found in countries with higher levels of national income inequality. Conclusions Although both national wealth and income inequality are associated with (socioeconomic inequalities in) adolescent mental wellbeing, associations are in opposite directions. Further research is warranted to gain better understanding in the role of national wealth inequality on (socioeconomic inequalities in) adolescent health. Key messages This is one of the first studies to examine if socioeconomic inequalities in adolescent mental wellbeing are associated with national wealth inequality independently from national income inequality. Opposing effects of national wealth inequality and income inequality on socioeconomic inequalities in adolescents’ mental wellbeing warrant further research before policy recommendations can be made.

The rapid increase of wealth inequality in the past few decades is one of the most disturbing social and economic issues of our time. Studying its origin and underlying mechanisms is essential for policy aiming to control and even reverse this trend. In that context, controlling the distribution of income, using income tax or other macroeconomic policy instruments, is generally perceived as effective for regulating the wealth distribution. We provide a theoretical tool, based on the realistic modeling of wealth inequality dynamics, to describe the effects of personal savings and income distribution on wealth inequality. Our theoretical approach incorporates coupled equations, solved using iterated maps to model the dynamics of wealth and income inequality. Notably, using the appropriate historical parameter values we were able to capture the historical dynamics of wealth inequality in the United States during the course of the 20th century. It is found that the effect of personal savings on wealth inequality is substantial, and its major decrease in the past 30 years can be associated with the current wealth inequality surge. In addition, the effect of increasing income tax, though naturally contributing to lowering income inequality, might contribute to a mild increase in wealth inequality and vice versa. Plausible changes in income tax are found to have an insignificant effect on wealth inequality, in practice. In addition, controlling the income inequality, by progressive taxation, for example, is found to have a very small effect on wealth inequality in the short run. The results imply, therefore, that controlling income inequality is an impractical tool for regulating wealth inequality.

Inequality takes many forms, but it starts with inequality of wealth and incomes. From that flows inequality is social mobility, life expectancy, educational attainment and even happiness. And the inequality of wealth and income is very extreme – both withing countries and between rich and poor countries. The gaps are hardly narrowing, if at all. Behind extreme inequality is the concentration of the bulk of wealth in the form of the ownership of productive capital in just a few adults in the world – no more 1% of 8bn people. That concentration has arisen because of the economic structure of the capitalist mode of production as it has spread across the world in the last century. While that basic structure remains in place, redistribution policies for income and wealth will be inadequate. A fundamental change in the social and economic formation of modern economies is required.

Background and Problems: Due to limited emergency life support experience, nursing home nurses are usually unfamiliar with emergency life support procedures and their roles in the team work. The unfamiliarity may result in an ineffective resuscitation while facing emergency events. Purpose: The purpose of the study is to enhance emergency life support ability of nursing home nurses. Solutions: The project team developed the knowledge scale to measure the project outcomes in life support ability of nursing staffs. There are 30 items in the scale, including10 items of ECG interpretations, 10 items of team work and life support related knowledge, and 10 items of collaboration skills. We applied the team based learning strategies of the Healthcare Team Resource Management to the 3-month in-service education and trainings. These include giving emergency life support related lectures, developing the standards for the team-based emergency life support procedures, filming emergency life support simulating teaching videos, and grouping the nurses into5 groups for practicing the emergency training simulations. The outcomes were evaluated one month after completing the program. Result: The mean knowledge score of emergency life support improved from 63.7 to 88.5. The completeness of emergency life support skills increased from 43.2% to 90.5%. The completeness of team-work skills enhanced from 44.3% to 92.1%. Conclusion: Appling the healthcare team resource management into the in-service training can improve the emergency life support knowledge and skills of nursing home nurses, and thereafter to provide patient safety in health care.

We scrutinise the role of institutional, market, and financial freedoms within the occurrence of wealth and income inequalities, thus attempting to corroborate the Kuznets curve hypothesis by using general and decomposed measures. To this end, we apply an auto-regressive fixed effect framework with Driscoll Kraay standard errors to analyse the panel time series data for twelve Post-Communist economies. Our empirical results highlight that the overall economic growth provides two different implications for the income and wealth inequalities. Economic growth fosters income inequality up to a threshold point, afterwards it declines with further economic growth, thereby validating the Kuznets curve hypothesis. The decomposed analysis confirms that further economic growth surpassing the threshold level re-distributes income from the top 10% class to the bottom 50% and middle 40% classes.

This study aims to examine how uneven distribution of income and assets impacts economies and societies at large, exploring its causes, such as biased tax policies and global economic shifts that occur all around the world. Some consequences due to this issue are social unrest, reduced economic growth and diminished opportunities for the poor. It should also highlight that while wealth inequality is typically more extreme than income inequality, both are crucial indicators of economic disparity and are often addressed through policies like wealth taxes and investments in public service. The data to be taken here is from the time frame of 1991 to present day, by studying the two variables [ wealth and income inequality] the study aims to determine how the concept of income inequality correlated to the wealth in our country, it uses correlation analysis to draw an inference between the two variables. The rise of top-end inequality has been particularly pronounced in the period between 2014-15 and 2022-23. It is also important to note that by 2022-23, top 1% income and wealth shares are at their highest historic level [1990]

National-Level Wealth Inequality and Socioeconomic Inequality in Adolescent Mental Well-Being: A Time Series Analysis of 17 Countries

ANTITRUST AND INEQUALITY

Wealth inequality and financial inclusion: Evidence from South African tax and survey records

Most of the main observed features of the distribution of wealth have been studied in detail. We know much about the possible reasons for the long upper tail of the distribution, the age profile of mean wealth, portfolio composition, changes in the distribution over time, differences between countries, and the very low wealth-holdings observed for some people at all ages (see Davies and Shorrocks, forthcoming). Yet one of the most interesting stylized facts about the distribution of wealth ‐ that wealth inequality follows a pronounced U-shaped age profile ‐ has received hardly any attention and has not been satisfactorily explained. In all countries where data are available, wealth inequality declines at least until middle age, and in almost all datasets it increases from middle age through retirement. The fact that the age profile of wealth inequality is U-shaped contrasts with the behaviour of inequality in earnings, income, and consumption. While inequality in earnings declines for the first five to ten years of the working lifetime, the dominant pattern is that inequality in all three of these variables rises over the lifetime. This is such a strong and well-known empirical regularity that it may have drawn attention away from the finding of a U-shaped profile for wealth inequality. This paper explores alternative possible explanations for the U-shaped age profile of wealth inequality. Aside from satisfying our curiosity, such an investigation may help us understand processes of wealth accumulation better. Deaton and Paxson (1994) obtained valuable insights requiring just that a saving model should predict rising income and consumption inequality over the lifetime. But a satisfactory model must be capable of more. It should predict not only that inequality in income and consumption will rise with age but also that wealth inequality will initially decline with age before rising over the latter portion of the life-cycle. As argued by Friedman (1957), the ability to reproduce the stylized facts of wealth inequality is an important test of models of consumption. The only previous attempt to model a U-shaped age profile of wealth inequality of which I am aware is Shorrocks (1975a). Shorrocks investigated a queuing model of wealth accumulation and illustrated the model through an application to the age profiles of mean wealth and wealth inequality. In his model there are two sources of shocks to wealth at a point in time. One is independent of current wealth, and arises due to earnings innovations. The other is proportional to current wealth (in expected value). The independent shocks act to reduce wealth inequality over time, whereas the proportional shocks do the opposite. Initially