This paper challenges the current belief that income inequality has a negative relationship with economic growth. It uses an improved data set on income inequality, which not only reduces measurement error, but also allows estimation via a panel technique. Panel estimation makes it possible to control for time-invariant country-specific effects, therefore eliminating a potential source of omitted-variable bias. Results suggest that in the short and medium term, an increase in a country's level of income inequality has a significant positive relationship with subsequent economic growth. This relationship is highly robust across samples, variable definitions, and model specifications.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version under "Related research" (further below) or search for a different version of it.
Volume (Year): 90 (2000) Issue (Month): 4 (September) Pages: 869-887 Download reference. The following formats are available: HTML
(with abstract),
plain text
(with abstract),
BibTeX,
RIS (EndNote, RefMan, ProCite),
ReDIF
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Cited by: (explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.) This item has more than 25 citations. To prevent cluttering this page, these citations are listed on a separate page.