Economic Inequality and Social Progress1
Chapter 3: Economic inequality and social progress1 Coordinating Lead Authors: Stephan Klasen, Giovanni Andrea Cornia, Rebeca Grynspan, Luis F. López-Calva, Nora Lustig2 Lead Authors: Augustin Fosu, Sripad Motiram, Flora Myamba, Andreas Peichl, Sanjay Reddy, Eldar Shafir, Ana Sojo, Ingrid Woolard3 Contributing Authors: Shai Davidai, Michael Förster, Rahul Lahoti, Judith Sutz, Rainer Thiele4 Abstract Inequality and its effects on societies have received increasing prominence in debates among economists and social scientists and in policy circles over the past thirty years. There are many, often interacting inequalities and different forms of inequality. Wide income and wealth inequality has harmful consequences for the economic welfare of societies, social cohesion, and other factors that intrinsically and instrumentally diminish social progress. While between- country income inequality has been falling recently, within-country inequality has been rising to varying degrees in most industrialized and many developing countries, though the experience of 1 Acknowledgments: Note that all authors have contributed to this chapter in their personal capacity and any views expressed here should not be attributed to the organizations the authors are affiliated to. 2 Affiliations: University of Florence, Florence; Ibero-American General Secretariat, Madrid; University of Göttingen, Göttingen, Germany; World Bank, Washington, DC; Tulane University, New Orleans. 3 Affiliations: University of Ghana, Accra, Ghana; University of Massachusetts, Boston, and Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research, Mumbai; REPOA, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania; Center for European Economic Research, Mannheim, Germany; The New School, New York; Princeton University, Princeton, NJ; United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, Santiago, Chile; University of Cape Town, Cape Town.
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