UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DESA) Working Papers

Rapid growth and structural change have reduced poverty in East Asian economies. Income inequality has been low in Korea and Taiwan, but has risen in recent years with economic liberalization. In the Southeast Asian economies of Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia, poverty has declined, while income inequality trends have varied, rising most clearly in Thailand. With its strengthened (private) property rights, market liberalization and sustained rapid growth, China has also experienced increased inequality despite considerable poverty reduction. Hence, the common claim of egalitarian growth in East Asia may have been exaggerated, especially since the 1990s.

Th is paper examines data on economic growth and various social indicators and compares the past 25 years (1980-2005) with the prior two decades (1960-1980). Th e paper finds that the past 25 years in low- and middle-income countries have seen a sharp slowdown in the rate of economic growth, as well as a decline in the rate of progress on major social indicators including life expectancy and infant and child mortality. Th e authors conclude that economists and policy-makers should devote more effort to determining the causes of the economic and development failure of the last quarter-century.

We analyze the growth impact of official development assistance to developing countries. Our approach is different from that of previous studies in two major ways. First, we disentangle the effects of two components of aid: a developmental, growth-enhancing component, and a geopolitical, possibly growth-depressing component. Second, our specifications allow for the effect of aid on economic growth to occur over long time-lags. Our results indicate that developmental aid promotes long-run growth. Th e effect is large and robustly significant, and withstands an array of robustness checks including alternative specifications, choices of the proxy for development aid, and treatments of outliers.

This paper presents estimates of world economic growth for 1970-2000, and changes in the intercountry and interpersonal distribution of world income between 1980 and 2000. These estimates suggest that, while the rate of growth of the world economy slowed in the 1980-2000 period, and average within-country inequality worsened, the distribution of world income among individuals, nevertheless, improved a little. However, that result was wholly due to the exceptional economic performances of China and India. Outside these two countries, the slowdown in world growth was even more dramatic, the distribution of world income unequivocally worsened, and poverty rates remained largely unchanged.

The paper presents a non-technical summary of the current state of debate on the measurement and implications of global inequality among citizens of the world. It discusses the relationship between globalization and global inequality, shows why global inequality matters and proposes a scheme for global redistribution.

Th is paper argues that developing countries’ growth successes and collapses tend to cluster in specific time periods—and that only the existence of a global development cycle can explain this. The cycle reflects the external factors that affect all, or large clusters of developing countries, and thus constrain their growth possibilities. Nonetheless, country-specific factors—particularly patterns of specialization—play a significant role in determining growth dynamics. From this perspective, the paper shows a very large difference between the economic growth of developing countries diversifying into higher technology manufacturing exports and those experiencing success in natural resource intensive sectors.

The Monterrey Conference on Financing for Development in 2002 brought leaders and senior officials from Governments and international organizations, senior financial sector executives and NGO advocates together for the first time on “hard” financial and trade matters. The Conference provided a forum at which participants talked to each other in informal roundtables, as well as made public speeches. Commitments were made to increase development assistance and to improve global as well as national governance. This paper examines how this unique event came about, traces the backsliding in international dialogue since then, and suggests how it could be reinvigorated.

Income inequality in the United States of America has increased over the past few decades. Along with this development, employee compensation as a share of national income has tended to decline, the profit share of national income has grown, and inequality within labour has risen. There is no empirical support for the argument that greater inequality has resulted in faster productivity growth, but there is some indication that rising inequality has been connected to slower demand growth. Increased access to credit may have temporarily muted the implications of greater income inequality.

This paper examines the macroeconomic and structural constraints to scaling up aid flows to developing countries to meet the Millennium Development Goals in 2015, including infrastructure, competitiveness and the real exchange rate, labour markets, fiscal constraints, governance, and aid volatility and fragmentation. The impact of these constraints on cost-efficient sequencing and composition of scaled-up aid flows is considered, using a dynamic computable general equilibrium model applied to Ethiopia. The main conclusions are that: (i) accelerating growth through productivity-enhancing infrastructure investment (and improved governance) is k ey to achieving the MDGs; (ii) large increases in aid risk undermining competitiveness and future growth; and (iii) skilled labour constraints require careful aid sequencing that limit the scope for frontloading.