Dynamics Of Inequality Research Articles

Reducing Socioeconomic Inequalities in the European Union in the Context of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development

The paper analyzes selected indicators monitoring the socioeconomic conditions of the European Union with regard to reducing inequalities. The main attention is paid to the 2030 Agenda and its Sustainable Development Goal 10, which calls for reducing inequalities within and among countries. The empirical part of the study is based on two separate studies and the data source is Eurostat. The first study focuses on the dynamics of the SDG10 indicators for the EU27. Due to the limited availability of all SDG10 indicators, the timeframe of this study covers the years 2010–2019. As a result, the SDG10 indicators for the EU27 as a whole are analyzed over that period or via a comparison of disparities between the two extreme dates, i.e., between 2010 and 2019. The second study focuses on the analysis of (dis)similarities of 27 individual European Union member states with respect to a set of variables capturing the socioeconomic conditions of these countries. The method used is cluster analysis, supported by the linear ordering method and principal component analysis. Due to the limited availability of indicators measuring the progress towards SDG10, especially those related to the evaluation of a citizenship gap, the second research does not use all indicators directly assigned to SDG10 (because most of them are not available for all countries), but rather employs a set of additional variables that may potentially affect the levels and dynamics of inequalities among and within countries. The general conclusion of the study is that the analysis of SDG10 indicators over the medium term (i.e., over the period 2010–2019) implies that the EU27 was able to make progress in reducing inequalities among countries; however, the income inequalities within countries persist or have even deepened. The insights from multivariate statistical methods emphasize the existing disparities between a group of countries, including Spain, Bulgaria, and Romania, and the rest of the EU countries in both analyzed years (i.e., in 2010 and 2019), regardless of the set of variables applied in analyses. Moreover, the results highlight the persistence in disparities between “old” and “new” member states and suggest the disparity between the “peripheral” and the rest of the “old” EU countries. Furthermore, the role of expenditure on social protection in affecting income disparities is emphasized, as is the impact of demographic factors in emphasizing the differences in socioeconomic situations across EU member states.

The Polish Panel Survey, POLPAN

AbstractThe Polish Panel Survey POLPAN provides data infrastructure to analyze the dynamics of social inequality from a life-course perspective. Historical events shape the study’s research design. In 1987–1988, 5,817 randomly sampled men and women aged 21–65 are interviewed in what is still state socialist Poland. Soon after, their lives are upended by the profound transformations that the anti-communist revolutions in Eastern Europe triggered. To understand how people transition to the emerging social structure, close to half of the respondents are re-interviewed in 1993. This sample serves as a panel that we follow every 5 years, most recently in 2018. Since 1998, POLPAN waves feature renewal samples of the youngest cohort that become part of the panel. Participants are interviewed face-to-face on a wide range of topics, including educational and occupational careers, psychological functioning, physical and mental health, political behaviours, and social attitudes. These topics address POLPAN’s overarching research problem, how does social position influence individual biographies and social networks, and how do individual choices that peoples’ biographies and networks reflect, in turn influence their later social standing. A multi-dimensional approach to data quality informs POLPAN methodology and the decision to publicly share the project’s products, including datasets and analytic tools.

Dynamic Labor Reallocation with Heterogeneous Skills and Uninsured Idiosyncratic Risk

Occupational specificity of human capital motivates an important role of occupational reallocation for the economy's response to shocks and for the dynamics of inequality. We introduce occupational mobility, through a random choice model with dynamic value function optimization, into a multi-sector/multi-occupation Bewley-Aiyagari model with heterogeneous income risk, liquid and illiquid assets, price adjustment costs, and in which households differ by their occupation-specific skills. Labor income is a combination of endogenous occupational wages and idiosyncratic shock. Occupational reallocation and its impact on the economy depend on the transferability of workers' skills across occupations and occupational specialization of the production function. The model matches well the statistics on income and wealth inequality, and the patterns of occupational mobility. It provides a laboratory for studying the short- and long-run effects of occupational shocks, automation and task encroaching on income and wealth inequality. We apply the model to the pandemic recession by adding an SIR block with occupation-specific infection risk and a ZLB policy and study the impact of occupational and aggregate labor supply shocks. We find that occupational mobility may tame the effect of the shocks but amplifies earnings inequality, as compared to a model without mobility.

Troubled schools in troubled times: How COVID-19 affects educational inequalities and what measures can be taken

When discussing possible consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic, it seems certain that the effects of the pandemic will most likely magnify existing educational disparities in Europe and around the world. However, so far, little is known about how the conditions and consequences of distance learning intensify existing dynamics of educational inequalities. This paper aims at answering the question of how educational disadvantages in socially deprived settings are exacerbated through the pandemic. On this basis, it reflects on potential educational practices that can help countering these dynamics. For this study, interviews with teachers in socio-economically disadvantaged ( n = 12) and in privileged settings ( n = 4) were conducted, transcribed and investigated through qualitative data analysis. The data were categorized with reference to Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of capital to analyze and systematize the empirical results. Finally, a case study from the interview material offers options for action that can counteract a possible worsening of educational disadvantages and help (re-)think school and teaching based on the experiences gained during the lockdown.

Inequality on the Increase: Trajectories of Privilege and Inequality in Madrid

In Spain, housing is one of the main axes of social inequality. Its position within Spain’s economic model and welfare system is key to understanding why its financialization at the beginning of the 21st century had such different consequences among residents as well as territorially. In this context, from 2001 to 2011, Madrid became one of the most segregated metropolitan areas in Europe. This article delves into how both housing and its location organise inequality in different social spheres and reproduce it over time. To this end, the geography of this inequality is analysed in different social residential trajectories, along with how segregation produces its own dynamics of inequality. The analysis is based on census data and applies a combination of factor and cluster analyses. The results reveal important processes of social residential marginalisation articulated by the interaction between high international immigration and the spatial manifestation of the housing bubble. The main socio-spatial result of this process is the disappearance of mixed social spaces in Madrid, previously located in the centre of the city. This dynamic produces opposite territories in terms of advantage and disadvantage in different spheres linked to social inequality such as education, health, leisure, care and even prejudice. In the process, impoverished immigrants disperse towards the neighbourhoods that concentrate the greatest disadvantages in each of these spheres.

Gender equality plans (GEPs) as a framework to devise gender equality measures for disaster research

Recently, disaster scholars have started to take a critical stance toward how disaster research is conducted and the extent to which disaster studies are inclusive toward research participants and researchers from diverse backgrounds. This article endorses an inward gaze to reflect on the dynamics playing out within the disaster research in terms of gender imbalances. Importantly, the article is not a review of the studies on gender issues in disaster contexts; rather it seeks to put forth a strategy to illuminate and redress the dynamics of inequality within the disaster research community, taking the gendered power relationships as a starting point. The article starts from the consideration that, despite an increased attention on the gendered dimensions of humanitarian crises, gendered aspects within the disaster research teams and organizations have been largely neglected. In particular, there is a lack of data pertaining to the gender presence and gender biases in the disaster research workforce and in the production of disaster-related knowledge. In order to fill this gap, a systematic plan to collect pertinent gender data and implement appropriate measures is needed. Here, we propose to adopt the framework of the gender equality plans (GEPs), an instrument promoted by the European Commission to advance gender equality in research performing organizations. The actions proposed in this paper seek to encourage reflections on the structural bases upon which disaster research is organized and to support the identification of the aspects we want to preserve and of those we need to change.

Energy efficiency-economic growth nexus: What is the role of income inequality?

The Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 7 stresses the importance for economies around the world to double their efforts in improving energy efficiency. Energy efficiency improvements have been found to trigger economic growth, albeit empirical evidence to support this claim remains mixed. In a world of widening inequality, how income inequality dynamics affect the growth and energy efficiency nexus is critical, yet empirical research investigating the role of income inequality is lacking. This study addresses this concern by examining the moderating role of income inequality in the economic growth – energy efficiency nexus. The study is based on an unbalanced yearly panel dataset for 51 African countries from 1991 to 2017. We measure energy efficiency using the stochastic frontier analysis technique and apply the two-step generalized method of moments (GMM) technique to examine the direct and indirect effects (moderating through income inequality) of energy efficiency on economic growth. We conduct several robustness checks to ensure consistent estimates of the parameters. We find that, directly, improving upon energy efficiency triggers economic growth, but this is compromised in economies with high-income inequality. The estimated conditional total effect of energy efficiency on economic growth is lower for countries with higher income inequality compared to countries with lower income inequality. By implication, reducing income inequality could be one effective channel through which energy efficiency can trigger economic growth.

MICROFINANCE, FINANCIAL DEVELOPMENT, FOREIGN AID, AND INCOME INEQUALITY: EVIDENCE FROM SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA

This paper examines the effects of microfinance, financial development and foreign aid on income inequality for 43 Sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries. Panel data for the period 1995–2015 is examined using fixed effects, pooled ordinary least square and system generalized method of moments (GMM) estimation techniques. Findings suggest that although foreign aid plays a determining role in explaining the dynamics of inequality in SSA, it does not appear to be pro-poor. Moreover, the results reveal that both microfinance and financial development contribute to narrowing the income gap between the poor and the rich and to reducing inequality. This implies that providing access to loans through microfinance institutions or bank-based financial system offer to the poor the potential for income-generating activities. Furthermore, the empirical evidence suggests that GDP per capita growth and government expenditures appear to be pro-poor. While a rapid population growth, high levels of inflation, FDI and trade openness are correlated, positively and significantly, with greater income inequality. These results have important policy implications for SSA. Enhancing the efficiency of social protection, promoting progressive taxation and distributional effectiveness of fiscal are crucial to address income inequalities.Keywords: Income inequality, Microfinance, Financial development, Foreign aid, Sub-Saharan Africa JEL Classifications: C23; D63; F35; O55DOI: https://doi.org/10.32479/ijefi.11277

Social movements as agents of change: Fighting intersectional food inequalities, building food as webs of life

What does the diversity of social movements and food initiatives tell us about processes of social change? I argue that they offer a productive analytical lens to observe social change because they identify injustices and dynamics of inequalities in the food system and are actively engaged in transforming these. Alternative local food initiatives react to the environmental impacts of globalized food relations; food sovereignty movements highlight class inequalities and power asymmetries in the food system that affect people’s rights to culturally appropriate foodways; food justice movements denounce institutional racism; feminist movements fight persistent gender inequalities from food production to consumption; vegan movements defend animal rights. These are often mapped onto different world regions, with food justice movements more present in the US; food sovereignty movements louder in the Global South; feminist food movements more active in Latin America; and local food movements commonly in the Global North. This article brings together diverse strands of activism and research on social inequalities related to food under the conceptual umbrella of food inequalities. In addition to concept building, it contributes to a sociology of food studies by mapping the geopolitics of knowledge about social change behind the growing mobilization around food issues.

Dynamics of inequality and growth in Europe: may spatial models solve the puzzle?

The link between income inequality and economic growth remains poorly understood. The global economic crisis challenged numerous growth studies by highlighting considerable degrees of spatial interdependence among economies. The existence of fewer restrictions on factor movements prompted spatial redistributions of income inequalities. Our paper attempts to reestimate such inequality impacts across the EU by allowing for these redistributions. We employ the spatial Durbin error specification, and unlike other studies, we make statistical inferences along the lines of a welfare-adjusted production function. Our results lend support to the presence of spillover effects emanating from income redistribution larger than those from unemployment, knowledge, or human capital.

Pollution, children’s health and the evolution of human capital inequality

This article examines how pollution and its health effects during childhood can affect the dynamics of inequalities among households. In a model in which children’s health is endogenously determined by pollution and the health investments of parents, we show that the economy may exhibit inequality in the long run and be stuck in an inequality trap with steadily increasing disparities, because of pollution. We investigate if an environmental policy, consisting in taxing the polluting production to fund pollution abatement, can address this issue. We find that it can decrease inequality in the long run and enable to escape from the trap if the emission intensity is not too high and if disparities are not too wide. Otherwise, we reveal that a policy mix with an additional subsidy to health expenditure may be a better option, at least if parental investment on children’s health is sufficiently efficient.

On the long-run dynamics of income and wealth inequality

We analyse top income and wealth shares data, by conducting a robust estimation of trends, tests for structural breaks, and tests for determining persistence. We include Anglo-Saxon countries, continental Europe and Asian countries, grouped under different percentiles and deciles, spanning a period that is at least close to a century. We find that the top income shares for almost all countries are characterised by broken trends, or level shifts. The preponderance of trend breaks appears in the 1970s and 1980s where after a negative trend changes in magnitude or direction. Finally, shocks to the top income share data are not transitory, which have consequences for policy such as advocating redistributive measures.

Do lixão à moradia

A configuração de situações de risco associadas à exposição humana a áreas contaminadas nas cidades é um problema inerente às dinâmicas de produção do espaço urbano que reproduzem vulnerabilidades socioambientais e afetam em maior grau os grupos socialmente marginalizados. O presente artigo discute o caso do Conjunto habitacional Heliópolis, construído sobre um lixão pela municipalidade de São Paulo no final da década de 1980 e destinado à população de baixa renda. O objetivo é de identificar e analisar as representações sociais dos moradores sobre o risco associado à contaminação do solo local, de forma a investigar como os residentes compreendem e se posicionam frente à situação vivenciada. A metodologia compreende um estudo de caso que se valeu da aplicação de entrevistas a 30 moradores do local e da análise de documentos sobre as medidas adotadas para o gerenciamento de risco. As representações sociais dos moradores expressam as múltiplas dinâmicas de desigualdade socioambiental que estruturam as relações sociais locais e o modo de enfrentamento adotado pelas instituições responsáveis para gerenciar a situação. Esses resultados expressam que o enfrentamento de risco em áreas contaminadas precisa ser revisto, sobretudo em países marcados por assimetrias sociais, como é o caso do Brasil, para que seja apreendido pela população e enfrentado de forma mais efetiva. Palavras-chave: Poluentes do Solo. Percepção Social. Fatores Socioeconômicos.

Two epochal turns of inequality, their significance, and their dynamics

At the end of the twentieth century, two historical turns of economic inequality happened. Among the developed countries of the Global North, the secular trend of decreasing intra-national inequality turned into its opposite. At about the same time, the long period of global inequality began to bend down, among households as well as among nations, a turn less noticed but more significant than the reduction of extreme poverty in the South. The foundation of the former turn was the beginning of de-industrialization in the North, and the coming of a post-industrial society, very different from the one predicted. The paper analyzes the trigger of the turn and the central dynamics of the new inequality in the rich North, financialization, and the digital revolution. It then tries to answer two questions about the global turn: Was the decline of global inequality causally connected to the increase of Northern intra-national inequality? Will there be a development of industrial societies in the South? The answer to both is no. What lies ahead is more likely a global convergence of intra-national unequalization, albeit with both different and similar dynamics, as the decline of extreme poverty in the South is leading to inequality increases comparable to those of the North. Post-industrialism has no egalitarian dialectic like that of industrial capitalism, but the dynamics of the twenty-first century inequality are likely to be confronted not only with popular protest movements but also with an emergent scholarly and intellectual Egalitarian Enlightenment.

Distributional Effects of Technological Regime Changes: Hysteresis, Concentration and Inequality Dynamics

In this paper we study the effect of different types of technological regime changes on the evolution of industry concentration and wage inequality. Using a calibrated agent-based macroeconomic framework, the Eurace@Unibi model, we consider scenarios where the new regime is characterized by more frequent respectively more substantial changes in the frontier technology compared to the old regime. We show that under both scenarios the regime change leads to an increase in the heterogeneity of productivity in the firm population and to increased market concentration, where effects are much less pronounced if the new regime differs from the old one with respect to the frequency of innovations. If the new regime is characterized by an increase of the size of the frontier jumps along the technological trajectory, the evolution of the wage inequality has an inverted U-shape with a large fraction of workers profiting in the very long run from high wages offered by dominant high-tech firms. Finally, it is shown that (oberservable) heterogeneity of worker skills plays an important role in generating these dynamic effects of technological regime changes.

Lives that Matter: Criminology and Global Security Inequality

Ideals of universalism and the idea that all lives are equally valuable, and should be equally worthy of protection, form a standard narrative for human rights regimes and international legal instruments. However, realities on the ground are marked by social arrangements where lives are de facto unequally protected. The article addresses one of the central criminological concepts and perspectives—that of inequality—and examines possible avenues for theorizing the dynamics of global security inequality. How well equipped is criminology to address the underlying processes of social stratification which shape decisions about whose life gets to be protected, and by what means? What might a global understanding of inequality look like? To what extent do existing concepts for analyzing inequality enhance or impede our understanding of global social cleavages?

Dynamics of crime rate, income inequality and urbanization across regimes in Pakistan

Dynamics of crime rate, income inequality and urbanization across regimes in Pakistan

Are street tree inequalities growing or diminishing over time? The inequity remediation potential of the MillionTreesNYC initiative

Most street tree inequality studies focus on examining tree abundance at single time point, while overlooking inequality dynamics measured based on a complete set of tree measures. Whether the severities of street tree inequalities vary with different tree structure measures, whether street tree inequalities are diminishing or growing over time, and how the inequality dynamics are affected by tree-planting programs remain largely unexplored. To fill these gaps, this study applied binned regression and cluster analyses to street tree census data of 1995–2015 in New York City. We investigated different structural measures of street tree inequalities pertaining to various aggregations of people, compared street tree inequalities over time, and revealed the inequity remediation role of the MillionTreesNYC initiative. We found that the underprivileged populations, characterized by higher percentages of the poor, racial minorities, young people, and less-educated people, are more likely to have lower tree abundance, less desired tree structure, poorer tree health condition, and more sidewalk damages. When disaggregating inequalities across various aggregations of people, income-based and education-based inequalities were the most severe, but the inequalities diminished over time. The race-based and age-based inequalities show mixed results that disfavor Hispanics, Blacks, and young people. The equity outcome of the MillionTreesNYC initiative is not ideal as the inequalities decrease when measured using tree count and species diversity, whereas they increase when measured using tree health and average diameter at breast height. The findings have important implications for more effective decision-making to balance resources between planting trees and protecting existing trees, and between increasing tree abundance and improving tree structure.

Dynamics of consumption inequality among occupational groups in India: Evidence from National Sample Survey data

This study analyses the dynamics of consumption inequality among various occupational groups using household survey data from National Sample Survey (NSS). Three rounds of NSS data namely, the 50th (1993–1994), 61st (2004–2005), and 66th (2009–2010) were taken for the purpose of analysis. Various measures such as Gini coefficient, overlapping index, and raking matrices are estimated for the whole as well as the subgroups using ANOGI methodology. From the analysis, it is found that the level of overall inequality as well as the between‐group inequality is on the rise during the period of analysis. Further, the measures such as relative overlap index and ranking matrices give conclusive evidence that the difference between various groups in terms of consumption expenditure pattern is increasing over time. From the ranking matrices, it is seen that the last six groups, constituting households with occupation in the unorganized sector and low level organized workers falls below the 30th percentile of consumption expenditure distribution of the first group groups that consists of individuals holding to technical, administrative, managerial, and executive occupations. Worsening inequality across various occupational groups is a matter of concern, especially from the policy perspective. As economic growth without equitable distribution of income is not a desirable outcome.

When Opportunity Knocks: Confronting Theory and Empirics About Dynamics of Gender Wage Inequality

We present empirical evidence that large structural shocks are followed by changes in labor market inequality. Specifically, we study short-run fluctuations in adjusted gender wage gaps (unequal pay for equal work) following episodes of structural shocks in the labor markets, using several decades of individual data for a wide selection of transition countries. We find that for cohorts who entered the labor market after the onset of transition. Labor market shocks lead to significant declines in the gender wage gap. This decrease is driven mostly by episodes experienced among cohorts who enter the labor market during the transition. By contrast, we fail to find any significant relation for cohorts already active in the labor market at the time of transition. We provide plausible explanations based on sociological and economic theories of inequality.