International trade and income distribution: reconsidering the evidence

This article reassesses the link between international trade and income distribution. We argue that one way to assess the influence of international trade upon income distribution is to take account of each country’s specific trade patterns by measuring the changes in the factor content of trade. The econometric specification is based on changes in Gini indices (over non-overlapping 4-year intervals), computed exclusively from series drawn from the same source. Our results show that a change in the factor content of trade has a significant impact on income distribution. The sign and magnitude of this impact is conditional on the national income level. We find that an increase in the labor content of trade raises income inequality in poor countries, but reduces it in rich countries (the reverse is true for the capital content of trade). In particular, we show that in the 1980s and 1990s, international trade may have contributed significantly to widening income inequalities in developing countries.     

Increasing returns: evidence from local wage rates in Great Britain

This paper shows that wage rate variations among local areasof Great Britain are significantly positively related to employmentdensity, and argues that this is due to the presence of increasingreturns deriving from more varied producer services in denserareas, controlling for the effect on wages of good access toan efficient workforce, either locally or as a result of in-commuting.The higher wages in Greater London in particular are seen tobe linked to increasing returns and enhanced worker efficiency,although other central city areas show similar influences toa lesser degree, with in-commuting a significant factor.     

Fertility,income distribution and economic growth: theory and cross-country evidence: comments

In a recent paper, Galor and Zang attempt to explain the large observed cross-country disparities in the levels and growth rates of per capita output. Cross-country variation in family size and income distribution patterns are an important element of such an explanation. Galor and Zang support the arguments put forth in their paper by using a simple variation of the model published by Galor and Zeira in 1993 and 70 cross-sectional growth regressions in the style of Barro's 1991 work. Some points in Galor and Zang's recent work require clarification. The author therefore reviews their work with the goal of clarifying some of Galor and Zang's underlying assumptions which are not that clear in their paper. The aim is to give the reader an idea of what Galor and Zang's paper does and does not do.     

Fertility,income distribution,and economic growth: theory and cross-country evidence

The authors perform discriminatory, empirical tests of a theoretical model that predicts that family size adversely affects output per capita and nonsteady state growth rates. Neoclassical models posit that adverse output and nonsteady growth rates are affected by labor force growth (LFG) or population growth (PG). This study tests whether family size (FS) will be more significant than LFG or PG in explaining differences in economic growth (EG) rates across countries during 1960-88. A proxy variable for the public education system was used to separate government interventions on human capital formation from market forces. Data were obtained for 73 countries, which exclude centrally planned economies, oil-producing countries, and those with less than 1 million population. The empirical test is run with 58-country, 45-country, and 96-country samples to test for robustness and reliability. The empirical test supports the theoretical model. It demonstrates that equal distribution of income and smaller FS enhance EG. With income inequality, the effect of FS was significant, and the effect of the LFG rate or PG rate was insignificant. With a given FS, LFG was positively correlated with EG. A reduction of the net fertility rate by one point would increase the worker output growth rate by 0.25%, and the differences in growth rates between high- and low-fertility countries would be 1%. An increase in the income share of the bottom 60% would increase the growth rate of worker output by about 1%. Higher investments in public or private education would be conducive to growth.     

Book Reviews: Great Britain and Ireland

Books reviewed: Malcolm Gaskill, Crime and mentalities in early modern England Nancy Cox, The complete tradesman: a study of retailing, 1550–1820 Rosalind Mitchison, The old poor law in Scotland: the experience of poverty, 1574–1845 Sarah Bendall, Christopher Brooke, and Patrick Collinson, A history of Emmanuel College, Cambridge Michael Roberts and Simone Clarke, eds., Women and gender in early modern Wales Lena Cowen Orlin, ed., Material London, ca. 1600 Martin Daunton and Rick Halpern, eds., Empire and others: British encounters with indigenous peoples, 1600–1850 Andrea Finkelstein, Harmony and the balance: an intellectual history of seventeenth‐century English economic thought Jeremy Gregory, Restoration, reformation and reform, 1660–1828: archbishops of Canterbury and their diocese Ron Harris, Industrializing English law: entrepreneurship and business organization, 1720–1844 Charles More, Understanding the industrial revolution Andy Bielenberg, ed., The Irish diaspora Simon Gunn, The public culture of the Victorian middle class: ritual and authority in the English industrial city, 1840–1914 J. Matthew Gallman, Receiving Erin's children: Philadelphia, Liverpool and the Irish Famine migration, 1845–1855 Keir Waddington, Charity and the London hospitals, 1850–1898 Katrina Honeyman, Well suited: a history of the Leeds clothing industry, 1850–1990 Gillian Cookson and George Ingle, eds., John Hodgson's ‘Textile manufacture and other industries in Keighley’ David W. Howell and Kenneth O. Morgan, eds., Crime, protest and police in modern British society: essays in memory of David J. V. Jones Michael French and Jim Phillips, Cheated not poisoned? Food regulation in the United Kingdom, 1875–1938 Brian Callanan, Ireland's Shannon story: leaders, visions and networks—a case study of local and regional development Graham Ingham, Managing change: a guide to British economic policy Philip de Souza, Piracy in the Graeco‐Roman world Edwin S. Hunt and James M. Murray, A history of business in medieval Europe, 1200–1550 Liliane Hilaire‐Pérez, L'invention technique au siècle des Lumières William Doyle, La vénalité Marco H. D. van Leeuwen, trans. A. J. Pomerans, The logic of charity: Amsterdam, 1800–1850 Herman Van der Wee, ed., The Generale Bank, 1822–1997 Thomas Max Safley, Matheus Miller's memoir: a merchant's life in the seventeenth century Gabriel Tortella, trans. Valerie Herr, The development of modern Spain: an economic history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries Panikos Panayi, Outsiders: a history of European minorities Lennart Samuelson, Plans for Stalin's war machine: Tukhachevskii and military‐economic planning, 1925–1941 Christopher Fyfe, ed., Anna Maria Falconbridge, ‘Narrative of two voyages to the River Sierra Leone during the years 1791–1792–1793’, and the journal of Isaac Dubois, with Alexander Falconbridge, ‘An account of the slave trade on the coast of Africa’ Andrew Jackson O'Shaughnessy, An empire divided: the American Revolution and the British Caribbean Steven N. Kaplan, ed., Mergers and productivity Shawn W. Miller, Fruitless trees: Portuguese conservation and Brazil's colonial timber Maria Misra, Business, race and politics in British India, c. 1850–1960 Sherman Cochran, Encountering Chinese networks: western, Japanese, and Chinese corporations in China, 1880–1937 Xin Zhang, Social transformation in modern China: the state and local elites in Henan 1900–1937 Ian Inkster and Fumihiko Satofuka, eds., Culture and technology in modern Japan David Turley, Slavery M. L. Bush, Servitude in modern times Mary A. Yeager, ed., Women in business Jonathan Zeitlin and Gary Herrigel, eds., Americanization and its limits: reworking US technology and management in post‐war Europe and Japan Sebastian Edwards, ed., Capital flows and the emerging economies: theory, evidence and controversies Phillip D. Curtin, The world and the West: the European challenge and the overseas response in the age of empire Christine Rider and Michéal Thompson, eds., The industrial revolution in comparative perspective Michalis Psalidopoulos, ed., The canon in the history of economics: critical essays     

Testing the impact of financial inclusion on income convergence: Empirical evidence from Nigeria

Financial inclusion, as a key pillar for inclusive development, has long been considered as an important instrument for reducing poverty and income inequality. However, the income convergence effect of financial inclusion remains only partially explored. Using longitudinal data covering three survey waves on Nigerian households, this study explores the potential of financial inclusion as an instrument for reducing income disparity. After controlling for the endogeneity issues, the results of instrumental variable linear and quantile regressions consistently show a strong nexus between financial inclusion and per capita income. This positive effect is experienced by all households regardless of income distribution. The decomposition results reveal that ab initio, financial inclusion resulted in income divergence leading to widening inequality across the households with various income distributions. However, the income convergence started from the middle to the higher income household categories, with the lowest income lagging behind in the second wave. The lowest income households eventually converged in the data of the third wave. In this sense, it can be argued that financial inclusion could play an important role in the reduction of income inequality.     

Inequality in turbulent times: income distribution in Germany and Britain, 1900–50

Using social tables, this article provides new data on inequality in Germany and Britain on an annual basis for the first half of the twentieth century. Inequality trends in these two countries tended to follow opposite patterns. The decline in inequality in Germany was interrupted during the First World War and the Nazi period, while in Britain the reversal took place between the end of the First World War and the Great Depression. Results show that the drop in inequality during the twentieth century in Europe did not follow secular trends, thus supporting the notion of inequality cycles.     

收入分配差距对农村居民主观幸福感影响实证研究

文章通过对中国农村社会调查的1 965个样本数据逻辑回归发现,绝对收入差距对农村居民主观幸福感的影响不显著;相对收入差距、收入分配公平感和家庭收入满意度与农村居民主观幸福感显著相关。因此,政府一方面应该继续推动经济的稳定增长,维护农村居民的切身利益,努力提高农村居民收入,另一方面应该完善收入分配政策,促进收入分配公平,以增强农村居民的主观幸福感。     

Dynamic model of childbearing and labor force participation of married women: Empirical evidence from Korea and Japan

The purpose of this study is the empirical investigation of childbirth behavior and labor-force participation of married women in South Korea and Japan. A dynamic discrete choice model is estimated using microdata from household surveys in South Korea and Japan. Estimation results suggest that: (1) only a second child is beneficial and others are not in the case of Korea, although any child is beneficial in the case of Japan; (2) nursing a newborn is considerably costly; (3) without considering an earnings effect, low-earnings jobs are costly in both countries, although high-earnings jobs are beneficial in Japan; and (4) the probability of finding a full-time position for married women after career interruption is estimated as 5–28%.     

Imperial Self-Insufficiency Rediscovered: Britain and Australia 1945–51

This paper addresses the unresolved debate about the timing of economic disengagement between Australia and Great Britain. During Chifley's administration international economic collaboration between Australia and Britain was close, Australia tending to identify its interests with those of the UK and the sterling area. Yet collaboration never stretched to acceptance by Australia of traditional forms of manufacturer–primary producer complementarity; this played no part in Canberra's postwar planning and priority given to industrialization led to the relative neglect of rural industries, which, together with the rapidly growing demands of its own population, reduced export surpluses and contributed to Australia's poor record as a food supplier. Buoyant export prices, especially for wool, combined with capital inflows from the UK to stimulate import demands. Because of dollar shortages most of these had to be sourced from Britain. From 1948 the UK not only expanded exports dramatically but was a major source of migrants and capital. Yet British industrial capacity in particular proved unequal to the task of meeting Australian needs. Imperial self-insufficiency again stood revealed, encouraging Menzies to look beyond the sterling area to support Australia's rapid development.     

The distribution of income: Evidence,theories and policy

Summary This Tinbergen Lecture begins by reviewing empirical evidence about trends in income inequality in a number of Western countries. There is considerable diversity of experience across countries. The first quarter century after the Second World War was not generally characterised by a steady downward trend in inequality, but by episodes of inequality reduction at different dates. More recently, several OECD countries have seen a rise in inequality, but the rates of increase differed and in around half of the countries shown there was no significant upward trend over the 1980s. The differing experiences, and the episodic nature of changes, have implications for the explanations of inequality considered in Sections 2 and 3 of the Lecture. I begin with the mechanism which Tinbergen described in Chapter 6 of hisIncome Distribution: the race between technological development and education. It is argued that behind the supply and demand model there lie a variety of factors, and that the explanation we give may be important in determining whether what we are observing are wagedifferentials or wageinequality. Moreover, we need to consider non-labour income, and Section 3 examines the determination of state transfers and of capital income. Finally, in Section 4, I consider some of the policy implications, focusing on one particular set of policy proposals in which Jan Tinbergen was interested: the idea of a basic income.Ninth Tinbergen Lecture delivered on September 29, 1995 at De Nederlandsche Bank, Amsterdam for the Royal Netherlands Economic Association.     

资本资产定价模型及其拓展模型实证研究介绍

由Sharpe、Lintner和Mossin提出的资本资产定价模型（Capital Asset Pricing Model或CAPM）是第一个在不确定的条件下探讨资本资产定价理论的数学模型，它为金融市场收益结构的分析提供了理论依据，是第一个可以进行计量检验的金融资产定价模型，一直以来都是大量实证研究的基础。资产定价问题作为金融经济学的一个核心问题，也越来越引起我国理论界和实务界的重视。本文结合我国现实经济活动的需要，对资本资产定价模型及其拓展模型在国内外的实证检验情况进行深入分析与总结，探讨了该理论在中国的适用情况．     

Inward and outward FDI and income inequality: evidence from Europe

This paper examines the effects of inward and outward FDI on income inequality in Europe using panel cointegration techniques and unbalanced panel regressions. Our main result is that both inward FDI and outward FDI have, on average, a negative long-run effect on income inequality. This result is robust to employing alternative estimation methods, controlling for potential outliers, using different measures of FDI and inequality, and changing the period and sample selection. Other findings are: (i) while the long-run effect of inward and outward FDI on income inequality is clearly negative, their short-run effect appears to be positive. (ii) Long-run causality runs in both directions, suggesting that an increase in inward and outward FDI reduces income inequality in the long run, and that, in turn, a reduction in inequality leads to an increase in inward and outward FDI. (iii) There are large cross-country differences in the long-run effects of inward and outward FDI on income inequality; for some countries the long-run effects on income inequality are positive.     

Export taxes and income distribution: The Philippines coconut levy

Export Taxes and Income Distribution: The Philippines Coconut Levy. — A large, empirically based general equilibrium model of the Philippine economy is used to analyze the implications of a tax on coconut oil exports. The analysis shows how general equilibrium models can be used to derive optimal tax rates and to show the detailed relationship between the rates at which these taxes are applied and their economic effects. The analysis explores in particular the effects such taxes have on economic welfare and on income distribution within the country. The distributional effects of this export tax are shown to be highly regressive, revealing more clearly the policy trade-offs such taxes involve.