From Clio Infrastructure
Inequality
Inequality is a key characteristic of the process of economic development, and at the same time an important determinant of success or failure in the world economy. Moreover, in CLIO-INFRA inequality is one of the key concepts used to understand and analyse the long term dynamics of the world economy. One of the aims of CLIO-INFRA is to demonstrate the multifaceted nature of inequality – both within and between countries – and develop ways of measuring other aspects of inequality in a consistent way, covering long time periods and many countries and regions.
The different concepts of inequality that will be analysed and estimated are:
- income inequality; 'we will expand the new dataset on the development of income inequality in the world economy, which is based on new evidence from a large number of (partly new) sources, and which aims to improve the estimates made by Bourguignon and Morrison.
- inequality of human capital formation, which can be derived from the data collected and analysed by the Debrecen hub;
- inequality of heights, which can be derived from the data collected and analysed by the Tübingen hub. This research project has as one of its aims to put together a global dataset of height inequality, which will reflect nutritional differences and disparities in health conditions of the world’s citizens over a very long time span;
- inequality of life expectancy: a dataset measuring this important aspect of global inequality will be produced by the gender and demography hub;
- gender inequality will also be measured – in various ways – by the gender and demography hub;
- inequality of land ownership: new research by Frankema makes it possible to reconstruct the inequality of land ownership in different parts of the world in the early 20th century.
The different hubs, and additional research by the Utrecht and Debrecen groups, will produce a set of indicators of inequality that can be made available and act as starting point of new analyses of the long term development of inequality on a global scale.
