Pre-industrial Inequality

• Tác giả: Branko Milanovic
• Ngôn ngữ: eng
• Ký hiệu phân loại: 339.22 Distribution of aggregate personal income and wealth
• Thông tin xuất bản: 2012
• Bộ sưu tập: Tài liệu truy cập mở
• ID: 304504
• Chủ đề: 1. Economic History: Labor and Consumers, Demography, Education, Health, Welfare, Income, Wealth, Religion, and Philanthropy: General, International, or Comparative N300; 2. Equity, Justice, Inequality, and Other Normative Criteria and Measurement D630; 3. Personal Income, Wealth, and Their Distributions D310

Tóm tắt

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.