Global Inequalities

Winner of the Bruno Kreisky Prize, Karl Renner Institut A Financial Times Best Economics Book of the Year An Economist Best Book of the Year A Livemint Best Book of the Year One of the world’s leading economists of inequality, Branko Milanovic presents a bold new account of the dynamics that drive inequality on a global scale. Drawing on vast data sets and cutting-edge research, he explains the benign and malign forces that make inequality rise and fall within and among nations. He also reveals who has been helped the most by globalization, who has been held back, and what policies might tilt the balance toward economic justice. “The data [Milanovic] provides offer a clearer picture of great economic puzzles, and his bold theorizing chips away at tired economic orthodoxies.” —The Economist “Milanovic has written an outstanding book...Informative, wide-ranging, scholarly, imaginative and commendably brief. As you would expect from one of the world’s leading experts on this topic, Milanovic has added significantly to important recent works by Thomas Piketty, Anthony Atkinson and François Bourguignon...Ever-rising inequality looks a highly unlikely combination with any genuine democracy. It is to the credit of Milanovic’s book that it brings out these dangers so clearly, along with the important global successes of the past few decades. —Martin Wolf, Financial Times

Drawing on research from around the world, this atlas gives shape and meaning to statistics, making it an indispensable resource for understanding global inequalities and an inspiration for social and political action. Inequality underlies many of the challenges facing the world today, and The Atlas of Global Inequalities considers the issue in all its dimensions. Organized in thematic parts, it maps not only the global distribution of income and wealth, but also inequalities in social and political rights and freedoms. It describes how inadequate health services, unsafe water, and barriers to education hinder people’s ability to live their lives to the full; assesses poor transport, energy, and digital communication infrastructures and their effect on economic development; and highlights the dangers of unclean and unhealthy indoor and outdoor environments. Through world, regional, and country maps, and innovative and intriguing graphics, the authors unravel the complexity of inequality, revealing differences between countries as well as illustrating inequalities within them. Topics include: the discrimination suffered by children with a disability; the impact of inefficient and dangerous household fuels on the daily lives and long-term health of those who rely on them; the unequal opportunities available to women; and the reasons for families’ descent into, and reemergence from, poverty.

This book examines the changing nature of global inequalities and efforts that are being made to move toward a more egalitarian world society. The contributors are world historical sociologists and geographers who place the contemporary issues of unequal power, wealth and income in a global historical perspective. The geographers examine the roles of geopolitics and patterns of warfare in the historical development of the modern world-system, and the sociologists examine endeavours to improve the situations of poor peoples and nations and to engage the challenges of sustainability that are linked with global inequalities. Overcoming Global Inequalities contains cutting-edge research from engaged social scientists intended to help humanity deal with the challenges of global inequality in the 21st century.

This book argues that inequality is not just about numbers, but is also about lived, historical experience. It supplements economic research and offers a comprehensive stocktaking of existing thinking on global inequality and its historical development. The book is interdisciplinary, drawing upon regional and national perspectives from around the world while seeking to capture the multidimensionality and multi-causality of global inequalities. Grappling with what economics offers – as well as its blind spots – the study focuses on some of today’s most relevant and pressing themes: discrimination and human rights, defences and critiques of inequality in history, decolonization, international organizations, gender theory, the history of quantification of inequality and the history of economic thought. The historical case studies featured respond to the need for wider historical research and to calls to examine global inequality in a more holistic manner. The Introduction 'Chapter 1 Histories of Global Inequality: Introduction' is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license via link.springer.com.

Inequality has emerged as a key development challenge. It holds implications for economic growth and redistribution and translates into power asymmetries that can endanger human rights, create conflict, and embed social exclusion and chronic poverty. For these reasons, it underpins intense public and academic debates and has become a dominant policy concern within many countries and in all multilateral agencies. It is at the core of the 17 goals of the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. This book contributes to this important discussion by presenting assessments of the measurement and analysis of global inequality by leading inequality scholars, aligning these to comprehensive reviews of inequality trends in five of the world's largest developing countries - Brazil, China, India, Mexico, and South Africa.

________________ As seen on Sky News All Out Politics ‘There’s no understanding global inequality without understanding its history. In The Divide, Jason Hickel brilliantly lays it out, layer upon layer, until you are left reeling with the outrage of it all.’ - Kate Raworth, author of Doughnut Economics · The richest eight people control more wealth than the poorest half of the world combined. · Today, 60 per cent of the world’s population lives on less than $5 a day. · Though global real GDP has nearly tripled since 1980, 1.1 billion more people are now living in poverty. For decades we have been told a story: that development is working, that poverty is a natural phenomenon and will be eradicated through aid by 2030. But just because it is a comforting tale doesn’t make it true. Poor countries are poor because they are integrated into the global economic system on unequal terms, and aid only helps to hide this. Drawing on pioneering research and years of first-hand experience, The Divide tracks the evolution of global inequality – from the expeditions of Christopher Columbus to the present day – offering revelatory answers to some of humanity’s greatest problems. It is a provocative, urgent and ultimately uplifting account of how the world works, and how it can change for the better.

During its 500-year history, the modern world-system has seen several shifts in hegemony. Yet, since the decline of the U.S. in the 1970s, no single core power has attained a hegemonic position in an increasingly polarized world. As income inequalities have become more pronounced in core countries, especially in the U.S. and the U.K., global inequalities emerged as a "new" topic of social scientific scholarship, ignoring the constant move toward polarization that has been characteristic of the entire modern world-system. At the same time, the rise of new states (most notably, the BRICS) and the relative economic growth of particular regions (especially East Asia) have prompted speculations about the next hegemon that largely disregard both the longue durée of hegemonic shifts and the constraints that regional differentiations place on the concentration of capital and geopolitical power in one location. Authors in this book place the issue of rising inequalities at the center of their analyses. They explore the concept and reality of semiperipheries in the 21st century world-system, the role of the state and of transnational migration in current patterns of global stratification, types of catching-up development and new spatial configurations of inequality in Europe’s Eastern periphery as well as the prospects for the Global Left in the new systemic order. The book links novel theoretical debates on the rise of global inequalities to methodologically innovative approaches to the urgent task of addressing them.

This open access book focuses on the meanings, agendas, as well as the local and global implications of bioeconomy and bioenergy policies in and across South America, Asia and Europe. It explores how a transition away from a fossil and towards a bio-based economic order alters, reinforces and challenges socio-ecological inequalities. The volume presents a historically informed and empirically rich discussion of bioeconomy developments with a particular focus on bio-based energy. A series of conceptual discussions and case studies with a multidisciplinary background in the social sciences illuminate how the deployment of biomass sources from the agricultural and forestry sectors affect societal changes concerning knowledge production, land and labour relations, political participation and international trade. How can a global perspective on socio-ecological inequalities contribute to a complex and critical understanding of bioeconomy? Who participates in the negotiation of specific bioeconomy policies and who does not? Who determines the agenda? To what extent does the bioeconomy affect existing socio-ecological inequalities in rural areas? What are the implications of the bioeconomy for existing relations of extraction and inequalities across regions? The volume is an invitation to reflect upon these questions and more, at a time when the need for an ecological and socially just transition away from a carbon intensive economy is becoming increasingly pressing.