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Since its original formulation, various extensions of the Kuznets hypothesis have been proposed. In this paper, we make use of a unique panel dataset of Canadian regions to test whether inter‐personal income inequality increases once the initial inverted‐U pattern is completed. Our results support the notion of a sideways S‐shaped curve describing a wavelike decrease to increase shift, with a turning point in the late‐1990s/early‐2000s where inter‐personal inequality across regions "bottoms out" before alternating to an upward‐sloping trajectory. While there are many factors associated with this reversal of trends, we find evidence that a region's size plays a role in explaining the more recent rise in inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Regional science investigations of geographical disparities in socio‐economic development sometimes utilize entropy, which measures a phenomenon's distributional uniformity across geographical space. Entropy also is widely utilized to measure random phenomenon dispersion, and often used to identify the most probable allocation of a phenomenon in space. Its common formulation is with empirical frequencies, following Shannon. Batty introduces spatial entropy assuming equal probability over space. His specification considers probabilities as fundamentally being spatially independent, which does not hold in most empirical geographical analyses. Hence, an entropy measure can be further modified by controlling extra variation caused by spatial autocorrelation. This paper proposes a Moran eigenvector spatial filtering (MESF) entropy specification that accounts for spatial autocorrelation when modelling georeferenced data. Using eigenvectors from a transformed spatial weights matrix, MESF identifies and isolates spatially autocorrelated components within a georeferenced variable. Coupling it with a non‐normal distribution, such as a binomial or beta probability model, which researchers often employ to describe empirical probabilities, expands its utility. The proposed method is examined with an application to regional income inequality in Poland during 2005–2012. This application demonstrates that accounting for spatial autocorrelation further enhances an entropy measure, showing that the MESF specification provides a flexible method for controlling spatial autocorrelation in an entropy formulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite seven decades of development of the European Union project, on 23 June 2016, the United Kingdom, Europe and the rest of the world were surprised when the Leave campaign won the Brexit referendum, offering an extraordinary case study for researchers. We spatially disaggregate the vote share data, which allows us to explore where anti‐European sentiment took root in the UK and why. In this paper, a spatial dependence model is applied to clarify and quantify the relevance of the different dimensions—demographic, cultural/educational and economic—that play a role in explaining the rise of support for the Leave campaign. The analysis is conducted at the local level, using local authorities (LAs) as the spatial unit of analysis due to the combination of official datasets with newly generated data in the context of an EU H2020 project. A new indicator capturing the affluence of each local area relative to its close neighbours is proposed and included in the model. In general, we observe that most of the main conclusions obtained by large regions or at the national level also hold at the local scale. However, it is particularly interesting that inequalities by LAs are clearly significant, indicating a marked influence on voters' decisions that have thus far been unaccounted for. This result provides further support for the existence of, to use Andrés Rodriguez‐Pose's terminology, an even more intense "revenge of the places that do not matter" at the local scale. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As cities grow, both the productivity of their inhabitants and the income distribution among them is expected to change. While the empirical literature has widely shown how productivity (and income) changes with city size, the empirical evidence on the effects on income inequality remains very limited. The few papers that study the relationship between city size and city‐level inequality focus on a single country and do not provide international comparative evidence. In this paper, we study the relationship between city size and income inequality at city level for a sample of 153 functional urban areas (FUAs) across 11 OECD countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A quarter of a century after Germany's reunification, Eastern Germans still earn substantially less than Western Germans. This paper revisits the German wage differential and isolates the effect of differing returns to human capital endowments, the possibility of a location effect, and human capital depreciation on the regional wage gap. While the endowment effect, location effect, and human capital depreciation jointly account for the wage differential between Easterners and Westerners living in the West, the same does not hold true for individuals settled in the East, where part of the wage gap remains unexplained. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides recent evidence on the contribution of the spatial dimension to inequality and more specifically accounts for the impact of the changes in the territorial distribution of the population on the recent dynamics of income inequality. We use LIS harmonized microdata for a selected sample of OECD countries. We provide new evidence over a more varied group of countries and a more recent period than in previous studies. We perform different types of decompositions to isolate the contribution of the changes in the territorial distribution of the population. The results show a generalized increase in income inequality, with an interesting "reducing effect" on this trend due to inter–territorial population movements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Alongside environmental benefits, renewable energy deployment is often evaluated on grounds of regional development. Focusing on wave energy deployment in Ireland, this paper quantifies employment‐related welfare change net of associated subsidy costs. Although the added employment reduces inter‐regional inequality, certain subsidies increase total income inequality by a greater extent. Total inequality increases by 0.25% in the preferred scenario. This pattern of incidence persists under an optimistic scenario where all manufacturing activity is carried out locally. This finding highlights that policies of regional development should consider the spatial distribution of associated subsidy costs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Stochastic dominance tests are used to measure whether distributions are directionally‐distinct. Using stochastic dominance measures, an income distribution can be measured to be more favorable for its members at all income levels than another distribution. This contrasts with conventional σ and β‐convergence approaches that compare distributions at a set of predetermined income levels. Given this comprehensiveness, stochastic dominance measures can yield novel insight into the relationship between income distributions, and thus to the relative economic welfare of inhabitants of different societies. However, stochastic dominance measures used in the analysis of regional income convergence have ignored the complications of geography. In this paper we examine the properties of common tests for stochastic dominance using various descriptive models of geographically‐realistic income growth processes. We find that the false positive rate of stochastic dominance tests increases significantly when comparing spatially‐informed income distributions growing over time. Further, this over‐eager rejection rate requires only that one distribution be spatially‐dependent, unlike some other bivariate statistics. We demonstrate that both the parametric and non‐parametric spatial filtering procedures are effective at resolving these issues in restricted circumstances for higher‐order dominance tests. Overall, while providing a novel and useful perspective on income distribution dynamics, stochastic dominance measures are demonstrated to have undesirable properties when used in geographically‐realistic scenarios and they resist one common method to address these issues. Solutions to the concerns expressed here remain open. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Inward foreign direct investment (FDI) has generally been linked to higher wages, but evidence remains sparse on the overall effects of FDI on average wages, the wage gap between skilled and unskilled labour, and inter‐industry heterogeneity. We address these issues for Mexican municipalities and industries for a period of increasing FDI and sectoral change that saw growing wage inequality. By combining two non‐experimental techniques we find that FDI in Mexico was associated with higher wages, mostly for skilled workers—but also for unskilled ones—and a widening gap between them. Effects vary both between and within industries depending on location, and they either wax or wane when the initial or incremental effects are considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper analyses the impact of the EU funds, for the European region of Azores, as they affect GDP, employment, and the wellbeing of families in different income levels, using a dynamic, multi-sector, computable general equilibrium model ( CGE) - Azor Mod. Simulating the impact of a total cut in transfers and comparing with a base business as usual scenario, it is concluded that the elimination of the EU transfers could cause a sharp permanent fall on public demand and an immediate 2 per cent fall in GDP. The fall in public demand causes a fall in consumer and investment prices which will foster a sharp increase in investment demand that gradually causes GDP to grow back to its initial levels within a ten year period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses patterns in regional inequality within and between Malaysia's 14 states, drawing upon estimates of Kuznets/Williamson curves, σ- and β-convergence and spatial spillovers. The path of regional inequality contradicts Kuznets predictions. Regional inequality initially fell but has subsequently risen with further economic development. While Malaysian governments have been successful at reducing poverty, they have been unable to curtail regional inequality in the long run. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses a balanced dataset extracted from the European Community Household Panel data survey for 94 regions over the period 1995–2000 to examine the relationship between income and educational inequalities in the regions of the European Union. It highlights the importance of geography and institutions in accounting for the economic performance of the European regions. The regression results suggest a positive relationship between income and educational inequalities, which have evolved differently across welfare regimes. Using different designs of spatial weights matrices which concern not only distance, but also the welfare regime, this paper shows that both spatial autocorrelation and spatial heterogeneity matter for inequalities. Resumen. Este artículo utiliza datos equilibrados extraídos de la encuesta del Panel de Hogares de la Unión Europea (PHOGUE) para 94 regiones durante el periodo 1995–2000 para examinar la relación entre la renta y las desigualdades educativas en las regiones de la Unión Europea. Resalta la importancia de la geografía y las instituciones para explicar el rendimiento económico de las regiones europeas. Los resultados de la regresión sugieren una relación positiva entre la renta y las desigualdades educativas, las cuales han evolucionado de manera distinta bajo regímenes diferentes de asistencia social. Mediante la utilización de diseños diferentes de matrices ponderadas espaciales relacionadas no solo con la distancia sino también con el régimen de asistencia social, este artículo muestra que tanto la autocorrelación espacial como la heterogeneidad espacial influyen en las desigualdades. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political institutions are an essential component to explain income variation. Brazilian municipalities are characterized by a great contrast in the colonization process and its impacts on the current income level and distribution, and other development aspects. This study analyzes the spatial heterogeneity of the relationship between institutional quality and the municipalities' economic development. We use a spatial moving window method applied to weighted regressions—Geographically Weighted Regression (GWR). We find evidence that good institutions increase income and other variables related to economic development. In addition, the institutional quality influence on economic development measures is distinct across the Brazilian regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The global crisis has hit regions within Russia to variable degrees because of great differences in regional economy patterns, which might have changed inter-regional disparities observed at the aggregate national level. This paper focuses on two of them, related to population's welfare, namely, inter-regional inequality in real incomes and integration of regional goods markets, and seeks an answer to the question of whether the global crisis has had a persistent effect on these. Results obtained suggest that the answer is generally negative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we consider how government quality mediates the relationship between fiscal decentralization and regional disparities. Previous work has argued that fiscal decentralization has the potential to reduce income differences across regions but that this potential may not be realized because of governance problems associated with sub-national authorities. Our empirical evidence based on a sample of 24 OECD countries over the period 1984 to 2006 lends a measure of support to this idea. We find that fiscal decentralization promotes regional convergence in high government quality settings but, worryingly, it leads to wider regional disparities in countries with poor governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bearing in mind that developing countries have less capital and less advanced technologies, this paper theoretically investigates the joint impact of two first-nature forces, Ricardian and Heckscher- Ohlin advantages and the second-nature force on spatial income inequality. We establish a new economic geography model without a traditional sector so that the wages are not equalized. By combining these three kinds of trade forces, we show how spatial income inequality changes with economic integration. Four evolution patterns are obtained which are consistent with diverse empirical results in the literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper tries to ascertain whether spatial contagion operated in international migration across neighbouring provinces in Spain during the 1998-2009 period. After a general depiction of the international migration distribution in Spain, the study focuses on the role played by space and, particularly, on the possible existence of geographical contagion effects. For this aim, two novel indexes of spatial contagion, based on a spatial Markov chain approach, are proposed. Two main results are drawn from the analysis: first, that spatial clustering exists in the distribution; second, that there are contagion effects, positive contagion among provinces surrounded by high-immigration provinces being the most significant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using the inter‐regional economic inequality index and the gross state product per capita for the Mexican states over the period 1940–2015, we apply regime dynamics and hierarchical cluster analysis for segmenting the sample into regimes of Mexican states with similar performance. Robust econometric models are studied showing the direction of causality between economic inequality and income per capita, and the existence of a U‐shaped curve for the interdependence between economic growth vs economic inequality, and threshold levels. We additionally demonstrate the existence of inequality traps. The education literacy rate as a control variable indicates an inverted U‐shaped curve. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Regional disparities in unemployment rates are large and persistent. The literature provides evidence of their magnitude as well as of the role of certain factors in explaining the unemployment gap between regions. Most of these studies, however, adopt an aggregate approach and so do not account for the individual characteristics in each region. This paper, by drawing on micro-data from the Spanish wave of the Labour Force Survey, seeks to remedy this shortcoming. An appropriate decomposition of the regional gap in the average probability of being unemployed enables us to distinguish between the contribution of differences in the regional distribution of individual characteristics from that attributable to a different impact of these characteristics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Knowledge of the determinants of self‐employment income is critical to entrepreneurial development strategies if the development goal is to increase incomes not just employment. Using American Community Survey data, unconditional quantile regression is used to investigate differences in the relationship between entrepreneurial income and an array of individual, industry, and regional characteristics across the self‐employment income distribution. Personal attributes, such as education, race, age, and gender, both explain differences in self‐employment income and vary in importance across the income distribution. Regional agglomerative effects are significantly positive and stronger at the upper end of the self‐employed income distribution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We analyse the impact of preference matching and income on the distribution of the population in an aggregate economy of an urban and an adjacent rural region. It costs more (less) to live in the urban (rural) region. Individuals choose to live either in the urban or in the rural region. They differ in their incomes. These incomes are uniformly distributed on the unit interval. Our analysis leads to four results. First, when the cost differential parameter satisfies a condition, both regions are occupied in the equilibrium. Second, when this parametric condition holds, in any equilibrium in which the mean income of individuals varies across the two regions, every resident of the rural region has a lower income than every resident of the urban region. Third, there exists an income threshold and all individuals with higher (lower) incomes choose to live in the urban (rural) region. Finally, in the equilibrium with income sorting, it is possible to make everyone better off by slightly modifying their residential choices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research has considered how gentrification may alter the racial composition, income composition and income segregation within a neighbourhood. An increase in income segregation at the neighbourhood level may be evidenced by a reduction in income inequality, which may harm low‐income households. We examine how the influence of gentrification, with respect to changes in income inequality at the neighbourhood level over time, may spill over into surrounding neighbourhoods as lower‐income households' location choices change. We use data from the 30 largest Core Based Statistical Areas in the US from 2000–2010 and find that areas bordering newly gentrified neighbourhoods experience an increase in income inequality (potentially benefiting low‐income households). This effect appears to be concentrated in relatively smaller CBSAs, where lower‐income households may have less mobility, and in surrounding neighbourhoods that are themselves relatively lower‐income. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research focuses on the state of Yucatan, Mexico, and provides evidence of unsustainable performance of the local economy: the local economic structure and income distribution widens the gap between rich and poor households. A constructive policy towards sustainable development would place greater emphasis on productive restructuring the agricultural sector, road transport and electric power generation, in designing actions of technological change and sustainable natural resource management. An exhaustive hybrid environmental social accounting matrix (ESAM) and linear multipliers models are used to analyse the interactions of the local economy with the use of resources, the environment and income distribution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China's growth has led to massive flows of migrants. To analyse the determinants of inter-provincial migration hypotheses from the classical migration theory, the new economic geography, gravity approach, and the new economics of labour migration have been derived. All traditional assumptions could be confirmed. Inter-provincial differentials of urban poverty and differentials in inequality do matter. Inequality is regarded as opportunity and motivation to move. The analysis of push-pull factors of gross migration suggests that pull factors are average wages, unemployment rates, urbanization and income disparity. Urban poverty can be regarded as a counter-pull factor. Rural poverty and average wage are push factors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Measures of economic well-being are often needed for geographically small areas, as economic indicators may be distributed unevenly among the subsets of relatively small regions. We consider small area estimation of average equivalized income. Disposable household income data are usually available only for a sample of households, typically too small to provide reliable estimates for small regions. We consider a small area estimation technique that is robust to outliers, produces results consistent with design weighted estimates obtained for larger areas and yield maps with approximately no shrinkage. The proposed methodology is applied to the Local Labour Systems in Tuscany (Italy). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to analyse the degree of female wage discrimination, its evolution over time and its distribution for socio-economic groups in the Galician region with respect to the rest of Spain. First we will try to explain the causes of the gender wage differential, and second, we will discuss the evolution of the wage gap between 1995 and 2002 in order to shed light on the potential factors of wage discrimination persistence in Galicia and Spain. Finally, we will examine the distribution of the degree of discrimination by using the discrimination curve and discrimination indexes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the productivity gains associated with the geographic concentration of industry (i.e., localisation) are by now well-documented, little work has considered how those gains are distributed across individual workers. This article offers evidence on the connection between total employment and the relative wage earnings of high- and low-skill workers (i.e., inequality) within two-digit manufacturing industries across the states, and a collection of metropolitan areas in the U.S. between 1970 and 1990. Using measures of overall, between-education-group and residual inequality, I find that wage dispersion falls significantly as industry employment expands. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this note we provide evidence on the importance of location for the growth of per capita income of Brazilian states over the period 1985–2001. The study presents strong evidence of spatial dependence, and that regional inequality reduction occurred simultaneously with increasing spatial autocorrelation. The analysis of local indicators of spatial association confirmed that conclusion, showing the existence of two geographical clusters, one of low income states in the Northeast and North regions, and another of rich states in the Southeast and South regions. The low value for the convergence coefficient, in conjunction with the strong influence of shocks in the residuals, indicate the existence of a very sensible dynamic pattern of convergence across Brazilian states, which helps explaining the well documented persistence in regional income disparities in Brazil. After conditioning on other important variables that could affect growth, however, spatial dependence disappears. We have thus identified two potential channels through which the strong spatial dependence in the process of convergence of per capita income of Brazilian states occurs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Elasticities are estimated for long-run solutions of Markov chains of income distribution for the European regions. The results indicate that there will be no major changes in these long-run solutions for lower income states in the Markov chain and that effects on higher income states will be only moderate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines spatial aspects of distributional dynamics and finds that the distribution of US metropolitan incomes relative to their neighbours has diverged during the 1969-1999 period. Use of a spatial Markov approach shows that non-metropolitan neighbours of metropolitan regions have tended to converge during the period, with roughly equal rates of upward and downward mobility within the distribution. Non-metropolitan regions, not neighbouring metropolitan regions, show much less tendency to converge and reveal higher rates of downward rather than upward mobility. Results highlight regional differences in mobility coherence, with metropolitan areas in the West tending to outpace their non-metropolitan neighbours. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A multiregional Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) model of Korea is used to assess urban development strategy in terms of national economic growth and income distribution. We find that the dispersion of total investment expenditure to six large cities would be the best policy if the emphasis of national development were to be placed on economic growth, together with a reduction in regional income disparity. Conversely, a heavy concentration of investment expenditure in Seoul and Pusan would lead to an amelioration of inequality in the distribution of personal income, but it would be difficult to implement due to hostility towards a primarily city-oriented value system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]