Vietnam’s extensive social security system is claimed to have played a key role in the extraordinary poverty decline over the past decades. This claim is, however, not substantiated by empirical evidence. In this study, we investigate how well contributory pensions and social allowances...

We model the evolution of age-dependent personal income distribution and inequality as expressed by the Gini ratio. In our framework, inequality is an emergent property of a theoretical model we develop for the dynamics of individual incomes. The model relates the evolution of personal income to...

This paper aims to facilitate the understanding of the phenomena of poverty and inequality in the Peruvian society and, by extension, in other countries in Latin America through the use of the novel “Un mundo para Julius” by Alfredo Bryce Echenique with the framework proposed by the World...

The Inequality Process (IP) is a particle system model similar to that of the Kinetic Theory of Gases. The IP is a parsimonious model of competition among people for wealth. The IP explains a wide scope of stable patterns in the distribution of personal income and wealth. Econophysicists have...

The paper discusses the ∪-shaped relationship between the equivalence scale n^ε and the Gini index instead of considering the equivalence scale’s relationship to the generalised entropy measures, which was studied by Coulter, et al. (1992). An end-point condition is given for the ∪-shaped...

Whilst the aid-growth relationship has been deeply studied, the relation between aid and inequality has not. The paper finds a negative robust correlation between changes in inequality and foreign aid in a cross-section analysis for 77 countries and the period 1990-2000. This correlation is...

While the provision of subsidized loans through the VBSP forms a cornerstone of Vietnam’s antipoverty policy, little is known on the impact of these preferential loans. In this paper, we use fixed effect regression to estimate the average effect of the program on income and expenditures of...

This article comprises our introduction to the book The Politics of Empire: Globalization in Crisis (Freeman and Kagarlitsky 2004) which we wrote jointly to introduce the articles in that volume, was the outcome of a seminar called in 2002 by the Transnational Institute to assess responses to...

This paper takes advantage of a new source of information – the Gallup World Poll 2006 – to estimate and characterize income poverty and inequality in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) at the country level, and to compare LAC estimates to those in other regions of the world. The Gallup...

The recent growth of soybean cultivation in the Brazilian Amazon has been unprecedented, even as the debate continues over its economic and environmental consequences. Based on contemporary datasets as well as our own field studies, this paper examines the social and economic costs and benefits...