Inequality and economic growth: An overview of how income inequalities have affected economic growth in the OECD countries from 1993 to 2018

• Autor(a) principal: Santos, Rui Miguel Flamino
• Data de Publicação: 2024
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10071/32115
• topic: Distribuição do rendimento -- Income distribution; Desigualdade social -- Social inequality; Crescimento económico -- Economic growth; System-GMM; Método dos momentos generalizados

This paper assesses the role that income inequality plays in economic growth among a group of 37 OECD countries between 1993 and 2018, using 5-year averages. Different inequality measures were considered such as the Gini coefficient of disposable income and shares of income on different percentiles of the pre-tax national income distribution. Following the literature, the estimations were performed using the two-step system GMM for controlling endogeneity and bi-causality in this relationship. The set of control variables comprises features such as health, human capital, and physical capital, among others. The main results show that inequality has a small but negative impact on economic growth regardless of the inequality measure used and across different instruments.