O objetivo primordial deste trabalho é analisar se a democracia é uma instituição política que produz resultados econômicos menos desiguais do que os regimes autoritários. A importância deste tema reside no fato que a própria promoção da democracia na agenda da política internacional tornou-se fundamental por inúmeras razões entre as quais sua suposta propensão em reduzir estas disparidades econômicas. Em primeiro lugar apresentamos no Capítulo 1 um balanço da discussão teórica e empírica a partir da qual constatamos que, a despeito do senso comum de que a democracia está relacionada a uma cidadania mais igualitária, os seus efeitos sobre a desigualdade ainda são discutíveis. Mesmo existindo um razoável consenso teórico de que os regimes democráticos devem, de alguma forma, produzir uma melhor distribuição de bens, os resultados empíricos são inconclusivos e contraditórios. Em seguida, diante de tal impasse empírico, propomos no Capítulo 2 uma reformulação da argumentação na qual entendemos que os efeitos da democracia sobre a desigualdade devem ser reinterpretados. A principal contribuição da tese reside na constatação, tanto teórica quanto empírica, de que estes efeitos são heterogêneos e interagem com o próprio nível de desigualdade...

Este trabalho objetiva analisar a evolução recente da distribuição de renda brasileira e gaúcha, no período de 2005 a 2009. Também procura identificar se ocorreu ou não o desaparecimento da classe média. Para isto é necessário diferenciar os conceitos de desigualdade e de polarização, bem como analisar a tendência de ambas as medidas no período em questão. Para alcançar tais objetivos, este estudo utiliza medidas consolidadas na literatura para a mensuração da desigualdade e da polarização. O índice de Gini foi utilizado para medir a desigualdade e os índices de Foster-Wolfson e de Duclos, Esteban e Ray (DER) para medir a polarização. Os resultados apontam que houve uma redução da desigualdade de renda no Rio Grande do Sul, ao mesmo tempo em que a classe média não diminuiu. Isto indica que não houve polarização da renda nos anos analisados.; The objective of this study is to analyze the recent evolution of the income distribution in Brazil and in the Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul from 2005 to 2009. It also intends to identify a possible disappearance of the middle class. For those purposes, it is necessary to make a distinction between the concepts of inequality and polarization, and also to analyze the tendency of both measures during the studied period. To achieve these aims...

Essa dissertação analisa a desigualdade e a polarização da distribuição da renda domiciliar per capita e da renda das pessoas ocupadas no Brasil e no estado de São Paulo, no período 1992-2007, utilizando os dados da Pesquisa Nacional por Amostra de Domicílios. Inicialmente são expostas as maneiras de medir a desigualdade e a polarização da renda, ressaltando a distinção entre esses dois conceitos. Contrariando a disseminada idéia do "desaparecimento da classe média", os resultados obtidos não permitem constatar aumento da polarização nas distribuições de renda analisadas. Verifica-se que, da mesma maneira que a desigualdade, a polarização da renda mostra tendência decrescente, principalmente quando são analisados somente os anos 2000; This dissertation analyses the inequality and the polarization of the distribution of per capita household income and of the distribution of earnings of occupied persons in Brazil and in the state of São Paulo, from 1992 to 2007, using annual data from the Brazilian National Household Sample Survey. Measures of inequality and polarization are presented, making clear the distinction between these concepts. Contradicting the idea of a "shrinking middle class", the results do not indicate an increase in the polarization of the income distributions analyzed. It is observed that the degree of polarization...

Social science research finds that the only group to have experienced real economic gains over the past four decades is the top 20 percent of the income distribution. This finding, along with greater awareness of growing inequality, has renewed interest in mobility research that identifies how individuals and their progeny move into and out of upper versus lower income categories. In this study a new mobility methodology is proposed using life course concepts and life table statistical techniques. Panel data from a prospective national sample of the U.S. population age 25 to 60 are analyzed to estimate the extent of mobility associated with top percentiles in the income distribution. Empirical results suggest high mobility associated with top-level income. For example, 11 percent of the population is found to occupy the top one percentile for one or more years between the ages of 25 and 60. The study findings suggest that many experience short-term and/or intermittent mobility into top-level income, versus a smaller set that persist within top-level income over many consecutive years. Implications of the findings are discussed in terms of inequality buffering, opportunity versus insecurity, and the demographics of income inequality.

Background: Although environmental policy decisions are often based in part on both risk assessment information and environmental justice concerns, formalized approaches for addressing inequality or inequity when estimating the health benefits of pollution control have been lacking. Inequality indicators that fulfill basic axioms and agree with relevant definitions and concepts in health benefits analysis and environmental justice analysis can allow for quantitative examination of efficiency-equality tradeoffs in pollution control policies. Methods: To develop appropriate inequality indicators for health benefits analysis, we provide relevant definitions from the fields of risk assessment and environmental justice and consider the implications. We evaluate axioms proposed in past studies of inequality indicators and develop additional axioms relevant to this context. We survey the literature on previous applications of inequality indicators and evaluate five candidate indicators in reference to our proposed axioms. We present an illustrative pollution control example to determine whether our selected indicators provide interpretable information. Results and Conclusions: We conclude that an inequality indicator for health benefits analysis should not decrease when risk is transferred from a low-risk to high-risk person...

Consideration of world inequality should cause reexamination of the key concepts underlying the welfare approach to measuring income inequality and its relation to measuring poverty. This reexamination leads to exploration of a new measure that allows poverty and inequality to be considered in the same framework, incorporates different approaches to measuring inequality, and allows varied expressions of the cost of inequality. Applied to the world distribution of income for 1820–1992, the new measure provides different perspectives on the evolution of global inequality.

The inequality dataset compiled in the 1990s by the World Bank and extended by the United Nations has been both widely used and strongly criticized. The criticisms raise questions about conclusions drawn from secondary inequality datasets in general. The authors develop techniques to deal with national and international comparability problems intrinsic to such datasets. The result is a new dataset of consistent inequality series, allowing them to explore problems of measurement error. In addition, the new data allow the authors to perform parametric non-linear estimation of Lorenz curves from grouped data. This in turn allows them to estimate the entire income distribution, computing alternative inequality indexes and poverty estimates. Finally, the authors use their broadly comparable dataset to examine international patterns of inequality and poverty.

Differing value judgments in measuring inequality underlie the conflicting factual claims about how much poor people have shared in the economic gains from globalization. Opponents in the debate differ in the extent to which they care about relative inequality versus absolute inequality, vertical inequalities versus horizontal inequalities, and whether they are consistently individualistic in assessing the extent of inequality. The value judgments on these issues made by both sides need greater scrutiny if the globalization debate is to move forward.

The academic literature on equality of opportunity has burgeoned. The concepts and measures have begun to be used by policy institutions, including in specific sectors such as health and education. It is argued that one advantage of focusing on equality of opportunity is that policy makers are more responsive to that discourse than to equality of outcomes per se. This paper presents a critique of equality of opportunity in the policy context. Although the empirical analysis to which the literature has given rise is useful and is to be welcomed, current methods for quantifying and implementing the concept with a view to informing the policy discourse face a series of fundamental questions that remain unanswered. Without a full appreciation of these difficulties, the methods may prove to be misleading in the policy context.

Thesis (PhD) - Indiana University, Sociology, 2007; Sociologists have explored the effect of social relationships on the outcomes of education for many years. Relationships with parents, teachers, and peers have long been established to influence student socialization, academic achievement, and educational aspirations, expectations, and attainment. Therefore, it is surprising that social support, as conceptualized mainly in the medical sociology literature, has rarely been explored as a source of influence on educational outcomes. Using the context of doctoral education in the United States and conceptualizing social support as resources accumulated through social relationships, I examine not only the effect of social support on graduate student professional socialization, but also the effect of organizational and individual level factors on the perceptions and use of support. I use measures from a private dataset entitled the Survey on Doctoral Education (SDE), as well as data from the National Research Council and the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS), to conduct factor analysis and multivariate regression analysis. My findings suggest that organizational factors such as institutional and departmental characteristics...

We consider the problem of ranking distributions of opportunity sets on the basis of equality. First, conditional on agents' preferences over individual opportunity sets, we formulate the analogues ofthe notions ofthe Lorenz partial ordering, equalizing Dalton transfers, and inequality averse social welfare functionals -concepts which play a central role in the literature on income inequality. For the particular case in which agents rank opportunity sets on the basis of their cardinalities, we establish an analogue of the fundamental theorem of inequality measurement: one distribution Lorenz dominates another if and only if the former can be obtained from the latter by a finite sequence of equalizing transfers, and if and only if the former is ranked higher than the latter by all inequality averse social welfare functionals. In addition, we characterize the smallest monotonic and transitive extension of the cardinality-based Lorenz inequality ordering.

Egypt's children and youth, representing more than one-third of the country´s population and its future, face several significant challenges, as shown by higher child poverty rates and unequal access to basic services. The objective of this report is three-fold: (i) to analyze the extent of inequality of opportunity among Egyptian children; (ii) to inform government policy on how success in life is influenced by factors predetermined at birth; and (iii) to identify policies and interventions that may contribute to improving equality of opportunity. The underlying premise is that ensuring equality of opportunity entails leveling the playing field in such a way that every child, regardless of the circumstances of his/her birth, will have an equal chance to succeed in life. This report analyzes the extent of provision of equal access to basic opportunities to all children (including healthcare, education, clean water and sanitation), and identifies the main circumstances that affect it and therefore determine human development outcomes. The analysis in this report builds on the concepts and ideas developed in the World Development Report (WDR). The findings are aimed at supporting debates and discussions...

The introductory chapter sets the stage and outlines the logic of the rest of the handbook. First, we present the main learning objectives; second, we introduce the pedagogical approach, methodology, and structure of the book. This handbook is intended to introduce the concepts of political economy to a wide audience of development practitioners, including civil society activists, journalists, students, and bureaucrats. Since the target readers vary widely in their previous exposure to the subject matter, the book summarizes a vast academic field and presents a comprehensive repertoire of concepts, theories, and empirical examples. Rather than offering a 'do-it-yourself' framework, we opted for developing a step-by-step analytical puzzle. First, the paper introduces the core mechanisms of political economy and their inner logic, and, subsequently, we help our readers learn how to recognize these mechanisms in their daily development-related work. By the end of the book, the authors hope that readers will be able to: recognize core development problems stemming from the political-economic environment; link theoretical concepts to real-life situations; diagnose the symptoms and the root causes of malfunctions; and understand the short-term and long-term consequences of poor governance and low institutional equilibria. This handbook is also designed to provide trainers with some of the pedagogical materials they need to develop an introductory course on political-economy analysis for policy practitioners. The content focuses on the what...

The paper presents an overview of calculations of global inequality, recently and over the long-run as well as main controversies and political and philosophical implications of the findings. It focuses in particular on the winners and losers of the most recent episode of globalization, from 1988 to 2008. It suggests that the period might have witnessed the first decline in global inequality between world citizens since the Industrial Revolution. The decline however can be sustained only if countries' mean incomes continue to converge (as they have been doing during the past ten years) and if internal (within-country) inequalities, which are already high, are kept in check. Mean-income convergence would also reduce the huge "citizenship premium" that is enjoyed today by the citizens of rich countries.

Is inequality largely the result of the Industrial Revolution? Or, were pre-industrial incomes as unequal as they are today? This article infers inequality across individuals within each of the 28 pre-industrial societies, for which data were available, using what are known as social tables. It applies two new concepts: the inequality possibility frontier and the inequality extraction ratio. They compare the observed income inequality to the maximum feasible inequality that, at a given level of income, might have been 'extracted' by those in power. The results give new insights into the connection between inequality and economic development in the very long run.

Building on earlier work by political philosophers, economists have recently sought to define a concept of equity that accommodates the fairness of reward to individual responsibility and effort, while allowing for the existence of some inequalities which are unfair and should be compensated. This paper -- commissioned as a chapter for the Oxford Handbook of Well Being and Public Policy -- provides a critical review of the economic literature on equality and inequality of opportunity. A simple 'canonical model' of equal opportunity is proposed, and used to explore the two fundamental concepts in this (relatively) new theory of social justice: the principles of compensation and reward. Ex-ante and ex-post versions of the compensation principle are presented, and the tensions between them are discussed. Different approaches to the measurement of inequality of opportunity -- and empirical applications -- are reviewed, and implications for the measurement of poverty and of the rate of economic development are discussed.

peer-reviewed; This thesis explores the inequalities and privileges women experience by combining motherhood with paid employment. Examining the experiences of thirty ‘working mothers’ through an intersectional1 lens, this thesis reveals complex patterns of inequality and privilege, which arise at the intersection of motherhood with paid work because in contemporary Ireland the normative construction of an ideal worker is one without care responsibilities, and an ideal mother works full time in the home. Applying a feminist, intersectional research methodology, a case study was conducted with thirty women in a middle class Irish suburb. During focus group discussions and interviews, women reveal they experience different relations of privilege and penalty, because the social relations of gender, motherhood and class intersect with the institutional domains of family, workplace and society and at these intersections, women experience privileges or inequalities which vary according to each woman’s individual circumstances. Through the concepts of choice, care and time, this study reveals the power operating through the dominant discourses of neo-liberalism, individualism, feminism and motherhood, which encourage women to both devote significant effort to developing their children...

We put together the different conceptual issues involved in measuring inequality of opportunity, discuss how these concepts have been translated into computable measures,and point out the problems and choices researchers face when implementing these measures. Our analysis identifies and suggests several new possibilities to measure inequality of opportunity. The approaches are illustrated with a selective survey of the empirical literature on income inequality of opportunity.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1590/S1414-49802010000200005O presente artigo apresenta parte dos resultados e análises da pesquisa1 sobre as concepções de pobreza de atores sociais atuantes em políticas de combate à pobreza (Programa Comunidade Solidária e Política de Assistência Social) durante os governos Fernando Henrique Cardoso (FHC). A metodologia incluiu pesquisa bibliográfica, documental e de campo, utilizando entrevistas e grupos focais com sujeitos significantes (políticos, gestores públicos, líderes da sociedade civil e especialistas), para chegar ao conceito de pobreza entre as diferentes categorias estudadas. O estudo demonstrou a predominância de continuidades de concepções conservadoras, mas também identificou, principalmente entre alguns gestores, especialistas, líderes e políticos de esquerda, a apreensão de concepção politicamente mais avançada sobre o fenômeno da pobreza.; This article presents part of the results and analyses of a study about the concepts of poverty held by social actors active in policies to fight poverty (The Solidarity Community Program and the Social Assistance Policy) during the government of Fernando Henrique Cardoso. The methodology included bibliographic, documental and field research...

This dissertation analyses the dynamics of inequality and classes, from a positive and a normative viewpoint, focusing on two distinct, but related approaches - Analytical Marxism and the theory of equality of opportunity, - which raise significant philosophical, economic, and political issues. The importance of a dynamic perspective in the analysis of normative theories is emphasised as an essential tool in the process of theoretical construction. Indeed, this dissertation analyses some important anomalies of egalitarian and Marxian theories that arise in the dynamic context and suggest to reconsider our established views on inequality and classes. First, the proper temporal unit of egalitarian (or Marxian) concern must be defined: agents' whole lives or selected parts of them. Egalitarian principles based on different units incorporate different normative concerns, both in the analysis of existing inequalities and, unlike in the static setting, in the definition of the egalitarian benchmark. No principle seems entirely satisfactory in the analysis of unequal distributions, but corresponding segments egalitarianism defines the appropriate intertemporal egalitarian benchmark. Second, egalitarian theorists, since Rawls, have in the main advocated equalising some objective measure of individual well-being...