The New Geography Of Global Income Inequality

The surprising finding of this book is that, contrary to conventional wisdom, global income inequality is decreasing. Critics of globalization and others maintain that the spread of consumer capitalism is dramatically polarizing the worldwide distribution of income. But as the demographer Glenn Firebaugh carefully shows, income inequality for the world peaked in the late twentieth century and is now heading downward because of declining income inequality across nations. Furthermore, as income inequality declines across nations, it is rising within nations (though not as rapidly as it is declining across nations). Firebaugh claims that this historic transition represents a new geography of global income inequality in the twenty-first century. This book documents the new geography, describes its causes, and explains why other analysts have missed one of the defining features of our era--a transition in inequality that is reducing the importance of where a person is born in determining his or her future well-being.

Makes correlations between success and geography, explaining how such rising centers of innovation as San Francisco and Austin are likely to offer influential opportunities and shape the national and global economies in positive or detrimental ways.

This open access book investigates the link between income inequality and socio-economic residential segregation in 24 large urban regions in Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, North America, and South America. It offers a unique global overview of segregation trends based on case studies by local author teams. The book shows important global trends in segregation, and proposes a Global Segregation Thesis. Rising inequalities lead to rising levels of socio-economic segregation almost everywhere in the world. Levels of inequality and segregation are higher in cities in lower income countries, but the growth in inequality and segregation is faster in cities in high-income countries. This is causing convergence of segregation trends. Professionalisation of the workforce is leading to changing residential patterns. High-income workers are moving to city centres or to attractive coastal areas and gated communities, while poverty is increasingly suburbanising. As a result, the urban geography of inequality changes faster and is more pronounced than changes in segregation levels. Rising levels of inequality and segregation pose huge challenges for the future social sustainability of cities, as cities are no longer places of opportunities for all.

________________ 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.

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

Oriented toward the introductory student, The Inequality Reader is the essential textbook for today's undergraduate courses. The editors, David B. Grusky and Szonja Szelenyi, have assembled the most important classic and contemporary readings about how poverty and inequality are generated and how they might be reduced. With thirty new readings, the second edition provides new materials on anti-poverty policies as well as new qualitative readings that make the scholarship more alive, more accessible, and more relevant. Now more than ever, The Inequality Reader is the one-stop compendium of all the must-read pieces, simply the best available introduction to the stratifi cation canon.

World Inequality Report 2022 is the most authoritative and comprehensive account of global trends in inequality, providing cutting-edge information about income and wealth inequality and also pioneering data about the history of inequality, gender inequality, environmental inequalities, and trends in international tax reform and redistribution.

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.