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During the last few decades, the gap between the incomes, wealth and living standards of rich and poor people has increased in most countries. Economic inequality has become a defining issue of our age. In this book, leading political economist Frank Stilwell provides a comprehensive overview of the nature, causes, and consequences of this growing divide. He shows how we can understand inequalities of wealth and incomes, globally and nationally, examines the scale of the problem and explains how it affects our wellbeing. He also shows that, although governments are often committed to ‘growth at all costs’ and ‘trickle down’ economics, there are alternative public policies that could be used to narrow the gap between rich and poor. Stilwell’s engaging and clear guide to the issues will be indispensable reading for all students, general readers and scholars interested in inequality in political economy, economics, public policy and beyond.

Drawing together leading scholars, the book provides a revealing new map of the US political economy in cross-national perspective.

This is an annual publication that features articles on the theory and history of political economy. Each article falls broadly within critical tradition in economic thought and is associated with the work of classical economists such as Keynes, Marx and Sraffa.

This book presents a set of original and innovative contributions on state, institutions and democracy in the field of political economy. Modern political economy has implied the interaction between politics and economics to understand political, electoral and public issues in different nations, and in this volume a group of leading political economists and political scientists from Europe, America and Asia provides theoretical advances, modelling and case studies on main topics in political economy. The analysis of the role and performance of politics and democracy in diverse nations implies the study of the organization of the state, lobbying, political participation, public policies, electoral politics, public administration and the provision of public services. This book provides advances in the research frontier of these topics and combines historical evidence, institutional analysis, mathematical models and empirical analysis in an interdisciplinary approach. Political and social scientists, economists and those interested in the performance of states, democracy and elections can find new research results in this volume.