INCOME INEQUALITY AND GOVERNMENT REDISTRIBUTION: A CROSS-NATIONAL STUDY

This paper focuses on income inequality and government redistribution in 120 countries between 1980 and 2010. It begins by describing variation in inequality across countries and over time, distinguishing between income before and after government redistribution by way of taxes and social transfers. It then goes on to explore the sources of cross-national and over-time variation in inequality and redistribution with reference to a number of variables widely employed in the literature, including development level, economic globalization, ethnic fractionalization, political democracy and the partisan orientation of governing executives. We find that, other things being equal, per capita income is positively related to greater government redistribution and a more egalitarian distribution of post-government income, while ethnic fractionalization is related to less redistribution and greater inequality of disposable income. We find little evidence that economic globalization, democracy or partisan orientations are strongly related, in either direction, to the degree of government redistribution or post-government inequality in the countries we examine.