"An outstanding set of papers on the central challenge of our age: ambitious, analytically sound, and thoroughly grounded in real evidence. This volume deserves careful reading by all students of inequality and development."
Nancy Birdsall, President, Center for Global Development.

• An extensive review of the literature on inequality changes by country combined with quantitative analysis of trends in inequality indexes based on the World Income Inequality Database (WIID at UNU/WIDER).

• Shows that inequality has increased in 70 per cent of the 73 countries studied.
  
• Exhaustive measures of the impact on inequality of various sets of factors, including the Washington Consensus policies.
  
• Assesses the likely impacts of rising inequality on poverty and economic growth.

Based on an extensive review of relevant literature and an econometric analysis of inequality indexes, this volume provides the first systematic analysis of the changes in within-country income inequality over the last twenty years. In particular, it shows that inequality worsened in seventy per cent of the 73 developed, developing, and transitional countries analysed, and evaluates possible causes for this widespread rise in income inequality. The book goes on to offer the first empirical assessment of the relation between policies towards liberalization and globalization and income inequality.

"WIDER provides in this book hard data and analytical input for a subject that is more commonly dealt with in terms of ideological standings. It shows that the unequilizing forces present today at the national level in most countries must be faced by the authorities and, indeed, that countries which have maintained equity as a major policy objective have been largely able to avoid the adverse trends."

Jose Antonio Ocampo, Under-Secretary-General, United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs

Contents List
PART I: Income Distribution Trends, Theories, and Policies
PART II: Traditional Causes of Inequality: Still Relevant for Explaining its Rise in the 1980s-90s?
PART III, Recent Factors Influencing the Distribution of Income
PART IV. Country Case Studies
Index

Contributors:
Prof. Tony Addison WIDER
Prof. Anthony B. Atkinson, Nuffield College, Oxford University
Prof. Michael Carter, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Prof. Daniele Checchi, Universita degli Studi di Milano Bicocca
Dr. Ke-young Chu, Wesleyan University
Prof. Giovanni Andrea Cornia, University of Florence
Dr. Hamid Davoodi, IMF
Dr. Rahul Dhumale, Federal Reserve Bank USA
Prof. Robert Eastwood, University of Sussex
Dr. Sanjeev Gupta, IMF
Prof. Isra Sarntisart, Chulalongkorn University Thailand
Dr. Carolyn Jenkins SADC, University of Oxford
Prof. Raghbendra Jha, Australian National University
Dr. Sampsa Kiiski, WIDER
Prof. Michael Lipton, University of Sussex
Dr. Sanjay G. Reddy, Columbia University
Prof. Francisco Rodriguez, Venezulean National Assembly
Dr. Catherine Saget, ILO
Prof. Ajit Singh, Queens’ College, Cambridge University
Prof. Lance Taylor, New School University New York
Dr. Lynne Thomas, London School of Economics
Prof. Rolph van der Hoeven, ILO
Prof. A. Erinc Yeldan, Bilkent University Turkey

July 27, 2004.