Inequality and Development: A Critique.

In this paper the authors subject the influential cross-section estimation of the inequality-development relationship by Ahluwalia to detailed scrutiny. They investigate the robustness of his estimates to variations in functional form, and find that different functional forms--between which the data...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Anand, S, Kanbur, S
Format: Journal article
Language:English
Published: Elsevier 1993
Description
Summary:In this paper the authors subject the influential cross-section estimation of the inequality-development relationship by Ahluwalia to detailed scrutiny. They investigate the robustness of his estimates to variations in functional form, and find that different functional forms--between which the data cannot choose--lead to widely differing shapes for the inequality--development relationship. They also examine his data set which consists of income distributions for 60 developing and developed countries, and find that the distributions are not comparable with respect to income concept, population unit, and survey coverage. The authors construct a minimally consistent data set to reestimate the relationship, and show that the preferred functional form displays a reversal of the commonly accepted U-hypothesis.