Is Inequality Harmful for Growth? Theory and Evidence
Is Inequality Harmful for Growth? Theory and Evidence
复制标题
不平等对增长有害吗？
DOI：
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发表时间：
1991
期刊：
影响因子：
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通讯作者：
G. Tabellini
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
T. Persson;G. Tabellini
不平等对经济增长有害吗？我们认为是这样。总结一下我们的主要论点：在一个分配冲突更为重要的社会中，政治决策更有可能产生经济政策，允许个人将更少的回报用于促进增长的活动，如资本积累和生产性知识。在本文中，我们首先建立了一个理论模型，正式地抓住了这个想法。该模型具有政治经济均衡，它根据结构参数、政治制度和初始条件确定增长率序列。然后，我们用两组数据来面对可测试的经验含义。第一个数据集汇集了历史证据，可以追溯到19世纪中期，来自美国和八个欧洲国家。第二组数据包含来自发达国家和欠发达国家的广泛横截面的战后证据。在这两个样本中，我们发现不平等与增长之间存在统计上显著和数量上重要的负相关关系。经过全面的敏感性分析，我们得出结论，我们的发现没有被测量误差、反向因果关系、异方差性或其他计量经济学问题所扭曲。
Is inequality harmful for growth? We suggest that it is. To summarize our main argument: in a society where distributional conflict is more important, political decisions are more likely to produce economic policies that allow private individuals to appropriate less of the returns to growth promoting activities, such as accumulation of capital and productive knowledge. In the paper we first formulate a theoretical model that formally captures this idea. The model has a politico-economic equilibrium, which determines a sequence of growth rates depending on structural parameters, political institutions, and initial conditions. We then confront the testable empirical implications with two sets of data. A first data set pools historical evidence-which goes back to the mid 19th century-from the US and eight European countries. A second data set contains post-war evidence from a broad cross-section of developed and less developed countries. In both samples we find a statistically significant and quantitatively important negative relation between inequality and growth. After a comprehensive sensitivity analysis, we conclude that our findings are not distorted by measurement error, reverse causation, hetroskedasticity, or other econometric problems.