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While current levels of economic inequality in Africa receive ample attention from academics and policymakers, we know little about the long-run evolution of inequality in the region. Even the new and influential 'global inequality literature' that is associated with scholars like Thomas Piketty, Branko Milanovic, and Walter Scheidel has had little to say about Africa so far. This paper is a first effort to fill that void. Building on recent research in African economic history and utilizing the new theoretical frameworks of the global inequality literature, we chart the long-run patterns and drivers of inequality in Africa from the slave trades to the present. Our analysis dismantles mainstream narratives about the colonial roots of persistent high inequality in post-colonial Africa and shows that existing inequality concepts and theories need further calibration to account, among others, for the role of African slavery in the long-run emergence and vanishing of inequality regimes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an effective procedure for matching data from the Italian Household Budget Survey (HBS) and the Survey on Income and Living Conditions (SILC), carried out by the Italian National Statistical Institute. In recent years, there is an emerging consensus on the need for distributional measures of well-being as a joint function of income and consumption, that should be jointly explored for explaining the households' economic conditions. However, the Italian National Statistical Institute does not maintain a unified database on income and expenditures for consumption. One of the most widespread approaches for fusing data is to use statistical matching techniques, which are based on the Conditional Independence Assumption. This assumption implies that the variables of interest are independent, given a set of common auxiliary variables with strong explicative power on income and consumption. Between the auxiliary variables, we also exploit suitable variables which are proxy of income, thus permitting to impute income on HBS, and proxy of consumption, thus permitting to impute consumption on SILC. The joint distribution of the proxies can be considered as a proxy of the joint distribution between income and consumption. Moreover, through the use of two synthetic measures, we reduce the dimensionality of the set of auxiliary variables, simultaneously preserving as much as possible of the available common information and the correlation structure between the auxiliaries and income, as observed in SILC, and between the auxiliaries and consumption, as observed in HBS. The contribution to the existing literature is various. In particular, we obtain a pooled sample with income and consumption, while previous attempts aimed at imputing only one of the two variables of interest in one survey. Second, the uncertainty deriving from the lack of information on the joint distribution of income and consumption is reduced with respect to previous works. Finally, the use of proxies, the high quality of the other auxiliary variables, as well as the particular mixed-mode matching procedure, permit to take advantage of all the available information reducing it to only two dimensions, so that the Conditional Independence can be considered a mild assumption. Keeping in mind that an effective matching for also imputing wealth, that is the third pillar of the households' economic wellbeing, is yet to come, the joined dataset could permit several types of analyses on economic inequalities and fiscal policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the relationship between well-being inequality and the economic crisis for countries from Central and Eastern Europe. Using data from Life in Transition Surveys waves 2006 and 2010, we assess the level of happiness gap by computing the instrument-effect-corrected standard deviation. Our results indicate that the dispersion in self-reported well-being levels increased after the economic crisis in all considered countries. We also show that the life satisfaction variation is not necessarily higher for those who report being poor compared to those from the upper part of the income hierarchy. Results also suggest that in general the gaps are higher in the case of those who report being not affected at all by the economic crisis compared to those who report being affected to a large extent by the crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates whether the relationship between income inequality and growth changes over time. Two time periods, covering 1970-1985 and 1985-1999, are analyzed and compared. A statistically significant relationship between inequality and growth in either time period fails to emerge. However, there are indications that effect of inequality on growth may be different in the nineties when compared to the seventies. In the literature, a consistent negative effect of inequality on growth is documented although the significance of the effect is open to debate. This paper also finds a negative effect of income inequality on growth in the seventies but, although statistically insignificant, a consistently positive effect in the nineties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]