Kemal Dervis

Over the past several years, concerns that technology and globalization lead to ever greater inequality have reached fever pitch in the US and beyond. To understand what’s behind this anxiety, three distinctions are useful.

First is to distinguish global inequality and its two components: inequality within countries and inequality between countries. Distinction two: inequality in developed versus developing economies. In the former, the trend is clear—nearly all developed economies have seen inequality rise over the past generation. Distinction three is between inequality in market income and disposable income. Until now we have described the inequality of disposable income, net of the effects of government taxes and benefits, which serve to reduce the inequality of market outcomes