Inequality, Redistribution, and Economic Growth

This paper provides a critical review of the recent literature on inequality and growth. After discussing historical and more recent distributional trends as well as empirical evidence on the relationship between inequality and growth, I focus on recent explanations of the inequality-growth puzzle. I consider both the impact of the functional and the personal distribution on long-run growth rates. A final section discusses a rather neglected issue in the recent literature: the impact of expected demand for innovation decisions.     

Status, the Distribution of Wealth, and Growth

We analyze a simple model of endogenous growth in which individuals care about both consumption and their rank in the distribution of wealth. We show that the steady-growth rate of the economy increases with both the strength of the status-seeking motive and the initial equality of the wealth distribution. Contrary to the basic model of endogenous growth, the equilibrium growth rate is not necessarily smaller than in the social optimum, and we identify the circumstances under which the two coincide.     

经济增长、腐败与收入不平等

本文利用我国1978²012年的时间序列数据,研究了经济增长和腐败对收入不平等的影响。研究发现,腐败扩大了居民收入差距,而经济增长则有利于缩小收入分配差距。因此,通过预防和惩治腐败,减少行政权力对经济和社会资源的垄断,降低行政权力对市场的干预力度,稳步推进政治体制改革,加强对行政权力的民主监督;同时,继续深化市场化改革,加快经济发展,提高居民收入占国民收入的比重,是缩小收入分配差距的关键。     

经济增长、财富分配与缓解贫困

随着人们对贫困内涵、贫困的性质和原因的认识日益加深,反贫困战略也从片面强调经济增长向经济增长与公平分配并重的方向转变。换句话说,反贫困战略日益重视效率与公平的统一。有效的反贫困战略是:既实现惠及贫穷人的经济增长,又实现有利于经济增长的再分配;而增加贫穷人的受教育机会,提高其知识水平,使贫穷人享受基本的医疗保健,改善其健康状况,解决穷人的基本生活需要,改善其营养条件,是再分配战略的重要内容。     

Relative Wealth, Consumption Taxation, and Economic Growth

This paper examines the role of the relative wealth-induced status motive in affecting the neutrality of consumption taxation in an optimizing growth model. It is found that a key factor determining the validity of the neutrality of consumption taxation in both the level sense and the growth rate sense is the desire for relative wealth-induced social status. When individuals care about their relative wealth, a rise in consumption tax enhances the steady-state level of capital stock and consumption. Furthermore, if the production function takes a linear technology form as the engine of sustained growth, then increases in consumption taxation raise the economy's long-run growth rate. In addition, an optimal consumption tax policy provides full subsidies to consumption so as to induce the economy to achieve the social optimum and the optimal growth rate.     

Economic Growth, Inequality, Democratization, and the Environment

We augment the Stokey (1998) model by allowingagents to differ with respect to environmentalquality and income in order to analyze theimpact of income and environmental inequality,and of democratization on aggregate pollution.We find that the impact of a more equal incomedistribution depends on the degree ofdemocracy. In a complete democracy a more equalincome distribution generates, ceterisparibus, less pollution, which is consistentwith indirect empirical evidence, whereas theopposite is the case if democratic rights arehighly restricted. Furthermore, ademocratization is argued to typically lowerboth the income and the environmental qualityof the median voter. In this case, if, inutility terms, the fall in environmentalquality is worse than the fall in consumptionthe median voter decides to tightenenvironmental legislation so that aggregatepollution decreases.     

经济增长、收入差距与农村贫困

我国经济转型过程中同时发生的居民收入增长和收入差距扩大对农村贫困减缓具有不同的影响。本文在住户调查数据的基础上,讨论了不同时期经济增长和收入差距对于农村贫困减缓的作用大小,估算了不同年份经济增长和收入差距的贫困减缓弹性,并根据Shapley分解讨论了分项收入对贫困程度的影响以及分项收入不均等性的贫困减缓弹性。     

经济增长与马克思主义视角下的收入和财富分配

本文构建了一个理论模型,试图应用马克思经济学的基本原理和方法研究当前资本主义生产方式下收入和财富分配不均等的形成机制,以及这种分配不均等和经济增长的关系。本文的分析框架具备了马克思主义经济学的主要特征,包括阶级分析、劳动价值论和资本雇佣劳动等,又结合了当代资本主义经济制度的某些特征,放宽了现有文献中"工人阶级无任何储蓄"的假设,所得到的结论可以在一定程度上解释1940年以来以美国为代表的发达资本主义国家的财富和收入分配情况,对于分析我国在社会主义初级阶段、多种所有制并存、多种分配方式并存条件下收入和财富分配不均等问题的成因和治理也有借鉴意义。     

Gender Inequality and Economic Growth in Korea

Calibrating an endogenous‐growth model to Korean data, we analyse the impact of gender inequality in Korea on long‐term economic growth. We find that gender equality policies that lower discrimination in the labour market or that increase the time spent by a father on childrearing can contribute positively to female labour market participation and per capita income growth. The simulation results show that when the disparities between men and women at home and in the labour market are completely removed, the female labour force participation rate increases from 54.4 to 67.5%, and the growth rate in per capita income rises from 3.6 to 4.1% on average over a generation.     

Wealth Inequality and Intergenerational Links

Previous work has had difficulty generating household saving behaviour that makes the distribution of wealth much more concentrated than that of labour earnings, and that makes the richest households hold onto large amounts of wealth, even during very old age. I construct a quantitative, general equilibrium, overlapping-generations model in which parents and children are linked by accidental and voluntary bequests and by earnings ability. I show that voluntary bequests can explain the emergence of large estates, while accidental bequests alone cannot, and that adding earnings persistence within families increases wealth concentration even more. I also show that the introduction of a bequest motive generates lifetime savings profiles more consistent with the data.     

Wealth Inequality and Asset Pricing

In an Arrow–Debreu exchange economy with identical agents except for their initial endowment, we examine how wealth inequality affects the equilibrium level of the equity premium and the risk-free rate. We first show that wealth inequality raises the equity premium if and only if the inverse of absolute risk aversion is concave in wealth. We then show that the equilibrium risk-free rate is reduced by wealth inequality if the inverse of the coefficient of absolute prudence is concave. We also prove that the combination of a small uninsurable background risk with wealth inequality biases asset pricing towards a larger equity premium and a smaller risk-free rate.     

Health, Wealth, Fertility, Education, and Inequality

The authors use a new cross-country dataset to estimate the strength of the links between different dimensions of social and economic development, including indicators of health, fertility, and education, as well as material wellbeing. This differs from previous studies in employing data for different income groups in each country in order to provide direct evidence on factors driving inequality, and in using a unique measure of material wellbeing that does not rely on PPP comparisons.     

贫富差别、城市化与经济增长——一个基于需求因素的经济学分析

贫富不均是近几年来我国经济发展相伴而来的一个重要现象。我们除了对它作价值判断,讨论公平与否之外,更加重要的是,确切地了解它对经济增长和经济效率的客观影响。本文从需求分析的角度讨论贫富差距扩大对经济增长的影响。我们引入熊彼特的观点,认为经济增长的动力来自于创新性研究,它可以提高商品质量并推动经济增长。通过构建一个基于二元结构(城市和农村)的两部门(消费者和厂商)模型,贫富差距就可以由农民的人口比例β和农民的相对贫穷程度d来衡量。由于高收入者对于优质商品有更强的支付意愿,收入分配状况影响在普通商品和优质商品之间进行的消费决策和厂商选择,进而影响为生产优质商品而进行的创新活动。结论是:在达到分离型均衡时,减少低收入者数量所引致的贫富差距缩小有利于创新,而提高低收入者收入所导致的贫富差距缩小则不利于创新。因此,推进城市化以减少农村人口比单纯增加农民收入更有利于经济的发展,是解决三农问题的根本方法。在经济发展水平和基尼系数给定的情况下,对跨国数据实证分析也支撑了我们的理论结果。     

经济增长与收入差距:一个基于主体的经济模拟途径

本文提供了一个基于主体的转轨经济模型,用于分析经济转轨过程中经济增长和收入差距的动态关联性.模拟实验结果表明:随着经济的持续增长,收入差距经历一个先扩大后缩小的过程;实施适度的累进税政策会在缩小收入差距的同时,促进经济高速增长.     

Effects of Aspirations and Habits on the Distribution of Wealth

We analyze how the introduction of habits and aspirations affects the distribution of wealth when the labor productivity of individuals is subject to idiosyncratic shocks and when bequests arise from a joy‐of‐giving motive. In the presence of either bequests or aspirations, labor income shocks are transmitted intergenerationally, and this transmission, together with contemporaneous shocks, determines the distribution of wealth. We show that the introduction of aspirations (habits) decreases (increases) the average wealth, and increases (decreases) both its intragenerational variability and the degree of intergenerational mobility. Therefore, a distinction between aspirations and habits is relevant because they involve different implications for the distribution of wealth.     

Secular Changes in Wealth Inequality and Inheritance

Data suggest that the distribution of wealth among households in the USA and UK has become more equal over the last century, though, at least for the USA, the pattern may have reversed recently. This paper shows that a model in which all households save for life-cycle reasons and some for dynastic purposes as well offers a possible or partial explanation: the model predicts rising cross-sectional equality of wealth when longevity increases. There may also be implications about very recent changes: expansion of social security programmes and government deficits can lead toward more wealth inequality. Slower growth may do the same.