Inequality, Democracy, and Persistence: Is There a Political Kuznets Curve?

By Alberto Chong. 2001

117 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The aim of this paper is to provide comprehensive empirical evidence on recent theories that link democracy and income inequality for the period 1960-1995. In simple cross-country regressions I find a non-monotonic link between these two variables when using ordinary least squares, instrumental variables, and Eusufzai tests. Since these results cannot be taken as "true" time series findings, even though recent theories that explain such a link are, I also employ recent methods applied to dynamic models on panel data. These techniques allow accounting for potential simultaneity and heterogeneity problems. Using the preferred econometric methodology, I also find support for the existence of a political Kuznets curve. Moreover, it appears that income inequality is unconditionally persistent. Results hold for two different democracy proxies and when sensitivity analysis is applied.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f72f387564a412eaad892cbcf07bf1f6216c538b

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Citations in the corpus

Reinventing Foreign Aid for Inclusive and Sustainable Development: Kuznets, Piketty and the Great Policy Reversal (2016, unknown): “33 Democratisation skews income distribution in poor societies (Chong, 2004).”
International Remittances and Income Inequality: An Empirical Investigation (2006, unknown): “This finding is consistent with those in Chong (2004), where he presents evidence in support of a non-linear relationship between inequality and democracy.”
Is Corruption Really Bad for Inequality? Evidence from Latin America (2011, background): “In contrast to the above, Chong and Calderón (2000) find a quadratic relationship between”
The Effects of Infrastructure Development on Growth and income (2004, unknown): “It also follows a rapidly expanding literature on the distributive impact of infrastructure provision and reform, which arose largely as a result of the worldwide trend toward increased private sector participation in infrastructure (Estache, Foster and Wodon 2002; Calderón and Chong 2004).”
Trust, welfare states and income equality: Sorting out the causality (2014, methodology): “Second, we also add themore recent explanation of a political Kuznets curve (cf., Chong, 2004).”