Globalization, Poverty, and Inequality since 1980
By David L. Dollar. 2004
247 citations recorded by the source corpus.
One of the most contentious issues of globalization is the effect of global economic integration on inequality and poverty. This article documents five trends in the modern era of globalization, starting around 1980. The first trend is that growth rates in poor economies have accelerated and are higher than growth rates in rich countries for the first time in modern history. Developing countries per capita incomes grew more than 3.5 percent a year in the 1990s. Second, the number of extremely poor people in the world has declined significantly. The share of people in developing economies living on less than dollar 1 a day has been cut in half since 1981, though the decline in the share living on less than dollar 2 per day was much less dramatic. Third, global inequality has declined modestly, reversing a 200-year trend toward higher inequality. Fourth, within-country inequality in general is not growing, though it has risen in several populous countries (China, India, and the United States). Fifth, wage inequality is rising worldwide. This may seem to contradict the fourth trend, but it does not because there is no simple link between wage inequality and household income inequality. Furthermore, the trends toward faster growth and poverty reduction are strongest in developing economies that have integrated with the global economy most rapidly, which supports the view that integration has been a positive force for improving the lives of people in developing areas
Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/48daa5d4b2995b6b4ff91f4999eaf3f83fd6e697
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Citations in the corpus
- Globalisation, Education and Development: Ideas, Actors and Dynamics (2007, background): “While the negative effects of these processes have been challenged (more recently by a range of robust defences, see Collier and Dollar, 2002; Dollar, 2004; Ravallion, 2004), many critics reject these findings and argue that, at the very least, poverty and inequality have shown little or no…”
- Looking Beyond Averages in the Trade and Poverty Debate (2004, unknown): “…poverty in China was one of the highest in the world.8 It has been argued by a number of observers that the country’s greater openness to external trade since Deng Xiaoping’s “OpenDoor Policy” of the early 1980s was the key to the subsequent success against poverty (World Bank, 2002; Dollar, 2004).”