| Summary: | In his classical paper on economic growth and income inequality, S. Kuznets (1955) discussed the process of population shift from traditional to modern activities as the basis for a theory of distributional change during the course of development. In this paper, the authors present a formalization of Kuznets process, conduct a general analysis of distributional change under this process, and derive the functional forms of, and conditions for a turning point in, the inequality-development relationship for six commonly used indices of inequality. The functional form appropriate to each index is then estimated using cross-section data on 60 developing and developed countries. Finally, some extensions to the initial formalization of the Kuznets process are considered.
|
|---|