This book looks at the distribution of income and wealth and the effects that this has on the macroeconomy, and vice versa. Is a more equal distribution of income beneficial or harmful for macroeconomic growth, and how does the distribution of wealth evolve in a market economy? Taking stock of results and methods developed in the context of the 1990s revival of growth theory, the authors focus on capital accumulation and long-run growth. They show how rigorous, optimization-based technical tools can be applied, beyond the representative-agent framework of analysis, to account for realistic market imperfections and for political-economic interactions. The treatment is thorough, yet accessible to students and nonspecialist economists, and it offers specialist readers a wide-ranging and innovative treatment of an increasingly important research field. The book follows a single analytical thread through a series of different growth models, allowing readers to appreciate their structure and crucial assumptions. This is particularly useful at a time when the literature on income distribution and growth has developed quickly and in several different directions, becoming difficult to overview.

Structuralist macroeconomics has emerged recently as the only viable theoretical alternative for economists and practitioners in developing countries. Lance Taylor's innovative work represents a landmark in this field. It codifies a new generation of structuralist macroeconomic models that incorporate the economic power relationships of key institutions and groups, integrates both finance and real macroeconomics, and covers a diverse range of experience in the developing world over the past three decades. In an introduction Taylor explains his methodology, describes assumptions underlying the models used, and reviews theories that relate economic growth and the role of financial assets. He then takes up basic structuralist models of a closed economy and moves on to consider the open economy cases. He incorporates the latest developments in the field (inflation, financial crisis, exchange rate management, increasing returns, and the like) in a treatment that departs substantially from economic orthodoxy. Taylor first addresses the question of how to specify "closure" or define the causal structure of macro models. He also considers how income redistribution influences growth and output and how income redistribution interacts with inflation. Next, an investment-driven non-full employment growth model draws on ideas introduced earlier to illustrate how different sorts of macroeconomic policies affect short-run adjustment and growth prospects over time. Taylor then turns to the problems proposed by economic openness in a stylized semi-industrialized country, starting with international trade. A fix-price/flex-price model is developed, and additional models demonstrate cases of policy relevance as well as interactions between class conflict and growth.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote in the Preface to his famous Discourse on Inequality that “I consider the subject of the following discourse as one of the most interesting questions philosophy can propose, and unhappily for us, one of the most thorny that philosophers can have to solve. For how shall we know the source of inequality between men, if we do not begin by knowing mankind?” (Rousseau, 1754). This citation of Rousseau appears in an article in Spanish where Dagum (2001), in the memory of whom this book is published, also cites Socrates who said that the only useful knowledge is that which makes us better and Seneca who wrote that knowing what a straight line is, is not important if we do not know what rectitude is. These references are indeed a good illustration of Dagum’s vast knowledge, which was clearly not limited to the ?eld of Economics. For Camilo the ?rst part of Rousseau’s citation certainly justi?ed his interest in the ?eld of inequality which was at the centre of his scienti?c preoccupations. It should however be stressed that for Camilo the second part of the citation represented a “solid argument in favor of giving macroeconomic foundations to microeconomic behavior” (Dagum, 2001). More precisely, “individualism and methodological holism complete each other in contributing to the explanation of individual and social behavior” (Dagum, 2001).

Piero Ferri expertly broadens the analysis of the canonical growth cycle approach by presenting a Minsky–Harrod model, examining how the relationship between income distribution, growth and unemployment becomes increasingly complex. Exploring this new technique to generate a process of growth, based not only on history but disequilibrium, he investigates the current income distribution debate further and the challenges it faces.

Econophysics has been used to study a range of economic and financial systems. This book uses the econophysical perspective to focus on the income distributive dynamics of economic systems. It focuses on the empirical characterization and dynamics of income distribution and its related quantities from the epistemological and practical perspectives of contemporary physics. Several income distribution functions are presented which fit income data and results obtained by statistical physicists on the income distribution problem. The book discusses two separate research traditions: the statistical physics approach, and the approach based on non-linear trade cycle models of macroeconomic dynamics. Several models of distributive dynamics based on the latter approach are presented, connecting the studies by physicists on distributive dynamics with the recent literature by economists on income inequality. As econophysics is such an interdisciplinary field, this book will be of interest to physicists, economists, statisticians and applied mathematicians.

An innovative approach to measuring inequality providing the first full integration of distributional and macro level data for the US.

This paper presents a structural macro simulation model to quantify the effects of alternative stabilization packages on the distribution of income and wealth. The model combines the explicit microeconomic optimizing behavior characteristic of computable general equilibrium models with asset portfolio behavior of macroeconomic models in Tobin's tradition. In this model there are four main mechanisms by which policy changes affect the distribution of income and wealth. First changes in factor rewards affect directly household income distribution. Second, household real incomes are affected by changes in their respective cost of living indexes. Third, household real incomes are affected by changes in real returns on financial assets since household incomes include income from financial holdings. Fourth, household wealth distribution is affected by capital gains and losses. Simulations with' the model are carried out for a representative economy subject to the interest rate and terms-of-trade shocks of the early 1980s. The simulations suggest a large adverse impact on the distribution of income of a sharp contractionary package. The resulting distributional shifts are likely to endanger the sustainability of the package even though the distribution of income becomes more equal when normal policies are resumed. By contrast, the targeted expenditure cut programs advocated by the critics of contractionary packages result in a much less unequal distribution of income during the adjustment package, even though the distributional improvements of the targeted package are mostly reversed in the post-adjustment period. The simulations support the view that stabilization packages which do not have specific components targeted towards the poor will have a noticeable adverse effect on the distribution of income, which is likely to result in some form of permanent damage for those below the poverty line.