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The respect of fiscal parameters is supposed to be – according to the official position of the European institutions – the best recipe for granting stability and growth. This optimistic view appears to be in contrast with the recent increase in poverty. The aim of this paper is to individuate the existence of a relation between governments' decisions about fiscal policy and absolute poverty in 19 Eurozone countries from 2005 to 2017. The attempt is to answer the question as to whether the effect on growth generated by fiscal policy measures can account for the objective of poverty alleviation. The results support the conclusion that absolute poverty increases in the presence of a restrictive fiscal policy, while it decreases in the opposite case. During declining macroeconomic conditions, national governments belonging to the Eurozone appear to be unable to reconcile the objective of sound public finance with that of poverty alleviation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses panel data from 61 countries at different stages of economic development over a 20-year period to investigate regional differences in the effect of corruption on economic growth and income distribution. Using two measures of corruption, we find that there are statistically significant regional differences in the growth and distributional impacts of corruption. The largest growth impact of corruption is found in African countries while OECD and Asian countries have the lowest growth impact. On the other hand, the largest distributional impact of corruption in found in Latin America. A 10% decrease in corruption increases the growth rate of income by about 1.7% in OECD and Asian countries, 2.6% in Latin American countries, and by 2.8% in African countries. A one standard deviation decrease in corruption decreases the gini coefficient of income distribution (0–1 scale) by 0.05 points, 0.14 points, 0.25 points, and 0.33 points in OECD, Asian, African, and Latin American countries, respectively. The results are robust to various specifications, measurement of corruption, measures of investment, as well as the conditioning variables. The results have interesting policy implications for economic growth, especially in low income countries with high rates of corruption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study of the counties of South Carolina introduces a limited purpose, modifiable technology that is designed to reproduce the rapid discovery strategy of the natural sciences. It uses factor analysis to identify types of communities and the threats they face, and evaluates their success in dealing with these by comparisons based on age-adjusted mortality rates. The factor analysis of mostly census indicators generated an Urbanization factor along with two measures of the interaction with the environment, Growth and Poverty. Growth was expected to predict mortality negatively while Poverty should predict positively. Regression analysis confirms both predictions but only for each race. That is, Growth predicted lower mortality, but only for African-Americans. Poverty predicted higher mortality, but only for whites. These and other puzzling findings are explored, illustrating the 'rapid discovery' technology that is the central feature of this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A comprehensive decomposition approach is applied to identify the factors that generated a remarkable change in income distribution, whereby in the a span of a decade, Brazilian inequality fell by one-fifth, and the incidence of poverty declined by two-thirds. It is argued that important elements related to these developments had been in place for some time. These elements included macroeconomic stability, long-standing increases in educational attainment, and favorable demographics in the form of a declining dependency ratio that proved to be both poverty- and inequality-reducing. Robust economic growth during the 2000s and the early 2010s resulted in across-the-board income gains that were widely shared, owing to mechanisms that favored advances at the lower end of the distribution of earnings. Demographics, as well as changes in educational attainment, labor force participation, and lower-skill prices explain most of the significant drop in the headcount ratio, with education and the interaction between economic growth and a rising wage floor accounting for the bulk of the change. The same factors explain up to 85% of the decline in income dispersion that was especially driven by markedly compressed earnings differentials. Human capital accumulation and strong labor market institutions thus stand out as key mechanisms linking economic growth to income distribution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]