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This article reviews the World Inequality Report 2018, a large collaborative data project based on the work of Thomas Piketty and the late Anthony Atkinson, which critiques the entire literature of inequality measurement from survey data and purports to provide superior, unprecedented and reliable coverage of income and wealth inequalities over the entire world, based primarily on tax records. The article examines three major issues: the coverage provided by tax data in the world economy, the consistency of tax data with other sources of information on income inequality, and the peculiarities of tax‐based measurement of inequality in the United States. Then a comparison is made with measures drawn from other forms of administrative data — specifically payroll records — which are generally more consistent with records of inequality measured in household surveys than are tax records. Following this, the article discusses the analysis of wealth and wealth inequality before offering a few closing remarks about policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes the evolution of inequality in the world economy since 1963 and describes the relationship between inequality, development, political regimes and the functional distribution of income. The movement of inequality within-countries since 1971 exhibits a strong common pattern across countries, suggesting that changes in the between-sector terms of trade and world interest rates exerted a powerful influence; thus, commodity prices and the global effects of monetary policy appear critical to changing inequality worldwide. We also find that political regimes matter: egalitarian regime types exhibit lower measures of inequality, after controlling for economic variables, region and changes over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper presents evidence for a common global pattern in the movement of inequality in national structures of pay, over the years 1963 to 1999. We find a worldwide pattern of declining inequality from 1971 until 1980, followed by a long and sharp period of increasing inequality from 1981 through the end of the century. The existence of a global pattern suggests that the study of inequality, long associated with the disparate effects of technology, trade in local or national labor markets and with national policy choices, would be better treated as a branch of a global macroeconomics, associated with the breakdown of Bretton Woods in 1971–73 and with the onset of the global debt crisis in 1981–82. The work is based on data sets developed by the University of Texas Inequality Project. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The deficiencies of the Deininger and Squire data set on household income inequality are well known to include sparse coverage, problematic measurements, and the combination of diverse data types into a single data set. Yet many studies have relied on this data due to the lack of available alternatives. In this paper we show how the UTIP-UNIDO measures of manufacturing pay inequality can be used, with other information, to estimate measures of household income inequality. We take advantage of the systematic relationship between the UTIP-UNIDO estimates and those of Deininger and Squire. The residuals from this exercise provide a map to problematic observations in the Deininger and Squire data, and the estimated coefficients provide a way to construct a new panel data set of estimated household income inequality. This new data set provides comparable and consistent measurements across space and through time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses two issues in the relationship between inequality and economic growth: the data and the econometrics. We first review the income inequality data set of Deininger and Squire (D&S), which, we argue, fails to provide either ade-quate or accurate coverage, whether through time or across countries. We then intro-duce our own measures of the inequality of manufacturing pay, based on UNIDO's Industrial Statistics. These provide indicators of pay inequality that are more stable, more reliable and in our view also more comparable across countries, than the D&S data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents monthly changes in the dispersion of industrial wages for Brazil from 1976 to 1995, and for Mexico from 1968 to 1998. Increases in wage dispersion over time; Negative correlation with the rate of real economic growth; Previous work on inequality and growth; Measurement of change in inequality from industrial data; Time-series measurements of inequality.