Concern with economic inequality is a defining feature of the current era. Prominent international public figures, ranging from Pope Francis to Christine Lagarde, have declared global economic inequality to be the top priority.
What are the preconditions for moving from [...]
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The World Bank’s latest annual report on poverty and shared prosperity has an unsurprisingly positive message that only 10% of the world’s population lived in extreme poverty in 2015, which is the most recent year that available data allows for global poverty estimates to be [...]
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Scientific understanding of the consequences of inequality has grown by leaps and bounds in recent years. Thanks to the pioneering work of scholars such as Joseph Stiglitz, Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson, and Tony Atkinson, we know that persistent social and economic inequality exacts an [...]
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Frank Stilwell, 'The Political Economy of Inequality: Taking Stock and Flowing...'
During the last few decades, the gap between the incomes, wealth and living standards of rich and poor people has increased in most countries. Prominent public figures have described current [...]
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In this joint blog post Christopher Sheil and I focus on The World Inequality Report 2018, published last week, which raises the question of whether Australia’s middle class is being squeezed by increasing concentration in the ownership of wealth.
Taking the combined results for the [...]
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Reaching the end as a state employee I decided to take a trip to the west coast of Tasmania. It’s a region defined by mines, forests and its isolation from the largest settlements during colonisation. And towns established to service industries have been abandoned and deprived of any [...]
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Public Letter from Economists, April 6 2017
Australia’s Fair Work Commission has recently decided to reduce penalty rates for work on Sundays and public holidays in the retail and hospitality sectors. Rates would fall by 25 to 50 percentage points of base wages, for most employees [...]
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It is not every day that political economists get into direct dialogue with the International Monetary Fund (IMF). But it happened recently as a result of an article appearing in the Journal of Australian Political Economy. Written by UK political economists, Alex Nunn and Paul White, the [...]
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