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In response to a growing interest in comparing inequality levels and trends across countries, several cross-national inequality databases are now available. These databases differ considerably in purpose, coverage, data sources, inclusion and exclusion criteria, and quality of documentation. A special issue of the Journal of Economic Inequality, which this paper introduces, is devoted to an assessment of the merits and shortcomings of eight such databases. Five of these sets are microdata-based: CEPALSTAT, Income Distribution Database, Luxembourg Income Study, PovcalNet, and Socio-Economic Database for Latin America and the Caribbean. Two are based on secondary sources: All the Ginis and the World Income Inequality Database; and one is generated entirely through multiple-imputation methods: the Standardized World Income Inequality Database. Although there is much agreement across these databases, there is also a nontrivial share of country/year cells for which substantial discrepancies exist. In some cases, different databases would lead users to radically different conclusions about inequality dynamics in certain countries and periods. The methodological differences that lead to these discrepancies often appear to be driven by a fundamental trade-off between a wish for broader coverage on the one hand, and for greater comparability on the other hand. These differences across databases place considerable responsibility on both producers and users: on the former, to better document and explain their assumptions and procedures, and on the latter, to understand the data they are using, rather than merely taking them as true because available.

In this paper, the authors examine the political economy drivers of the variation in agricultural protection, both across countries and within countries over time. The paper starts by listing the key insights provided by both the theoretical and empirical literature on the political economy of trade policy formulation. The authors then set out a basic framework that allows us to put forth various testable hypotheses on the variation and evolution of agricultural protection. The authors find that both the political ideology of the government and the degree of income inequality are important determinants of agricultural protection. Thus, both the political-support-function approach as well as the median-voter approach can be used in explaining the variation in agricultural protection across countries and within countries over time. The results are consistent with the predictions of a model that assumes that labor is specialized and sector-specific in nature. Some aspects of protection also seem to be consistent with predictions of a lobbying model in that agricultural protection is negatively related to agricultural employment and positively related to agricultural productivity. Public finance aspects of protection also seem to be empirically important.

In the last two decades, across a range of countries high growth rates have reduced poverty but have been accompanied by rising inequality. This paper is motivated by this stylized fact, and by the strong distributional concerns that persist among populations and policy makers alike, despite the poverty reduction observed in official statistics where growth has been sufficiently high. This seeming disconnects frames the questions posed in this paper. Why the disconnect, and what to do about it? It is argued that official poverty statistics may be missing key elements of the ground level reality of distributional evolution, of which rising inequality may be an indirect indicator. Heterogeneity of population means that there may be significant numbers of poor losers from technical change, economic reform and global integration, even when overall measured poverty falls. In terms of actions, attention is drawn to the role of safety nets as generalized compensation mechanisms, to address the ethical and political economy dimensions of such a pattern of distributional evolution. Addressing structural inequalities is also a long term answer with payoffs in terms of equitable growth. In terms of future analysis, diminishing returns have set in to the inequality-growth cross-country regressions literature. Further work to help policy makers should focus on: (i) new information to illuminate the disconnect; (ii) analysis and assessment of safety nets as generalized compensation mechanisms; and (iii) addressing specific forms of structural inequality related to assets, gender, and social groupings like caste or ethnicity.

The effects of globalization on income distribution within rich and poor countries are a matter of controversy. While international trade theory in its most abstract formulation implies that increased trade and foreign investment should make income distribution more equal in poor countries and less equal in rich countries, finding these effects has proved elusive. The paper presents another attempt to discern the effects of globalization by using the new data derived directly from household surveys. The paper looks at the impact of openness (trade/GDP ratio) and direct foreign investment on relative income shares across the entire income distribution. In contrast to what one would expect from theory, we find strong evidence that at low average income level, it is the rich who benefit from openness. As income level rises, that is around the income level of $5-7,000 per capita at international prices, the situation changes and it is the relative income of the poor and the middle class that rises compared to the rich. It seems that openness makes income distribution worse before making it better—or differently that the effect of openness on on income distribution depends on country’s average income level.