INTRODUCTION TO MACROECONOMIC DYNAMICS SPECIAL ISSUE: INEQUALITY

This special issue features inequality. This is a subject that rightly draws immediate attention from both the profession and the popular press. The numbers themselves are intrinsically interesting, if not disturbing. There is, on the one hand, great variety in the distribution of earnings and an enormously right-skewed distribution of wealth. On the other hand, there is absolute and relative poverty. In developing countries there are extremes coexisting on both ends of the distribution. But developing economies also feature growth with time-varying levels of inequality. Macroeconomic growth, stability, and social policies seem correlated with poverty reduction in some instances. © 2008 Cambridge University Press.