Of course, the other stunning fact is that since the mid- 1970s, or thereabouts, there has been a substantial divergence of income distributions within most of the countries of the world. Last time I looked at the LIS data they were listing only about six countries in the world that had seen more equality in the last ten years or so. Of course they don't have data on all the countries, just a whole lot of them.... Barkley Rosser -----Original Message----- From: Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com> Date: Sunday, May 16, 1999 5:55 PM Subject: Re: Summers & the Planet: A Reminder
>Michael Pollak wrote:
>
>>PS -- By the way, who is Lant Pritchett? That's not just some fancy code
>>for "Larry Summers is a Prick" is it? :o)
>
>Pritchett, a World Bank economist, has a very interesting 1995 paper called
>"Divergence, Big Time," which I wrote up in LBO shortly after it came out.
>Here's the abstract, from
><http://www.worldbank.org/html/dec/Publications/Workpapers/wps1522-abstract
.html
>>. The full paper is at
><ftp://monarch.worldbank.org/pub/decweb/WorkingPapers/WPS1500series/wps1522
/>.
>Doug
>
>----
>
>1522. Divergence, Big Time
>
>Lant Pritchett
>(October 1995)
>
>The basic fact of modern economic history is massive absolute divergence in
>the distribution of incomes across countries. This paper shows that even
>without actual historical data on incomes in the now poor countries we can
>reasonably estimate that the ratio of the incomes of the richest to the
>poorest countries increased at least sixfold between 1870 and today.
>
>Recently, much attention has been paid in the literature on economic growth
>to the phenomenon of "conditional convergence," the tendency of economies
>with lower-level incomes to grow faster, conditional on their rate of
>factor accumulation.
>
>Pritchett documents that, regardless of conditional convergence, perhaps
>the basic fact of modern economic history is massive absolute divergence in
>the distribution of incomes across countries.
>
>Discussions of long-run convergence or divergence have been hindered by the
>lack of reliable historical estimates of per capita income for poor
>countries. Pritchett shows that to draw reasonable inferences about whether
>incomes have converged or diverged does not require historical estimates of
>per capita income as a plausible lower limit for historical per capita
>incomes combined with estimates of current income in poor countries places
>a binding constraint on their historical growth rates.
>
>Pritchett estimates that between 1870 and 1985 the ratio of incomes in the
>richest and poorest countries increased sixfold, the standard deviation of
>(natural log) per capita incomes increased by between 60 and 100 percent,
>and the average income gap between the richest and poorest countries grew
>almost ninefold (from $1,500 to over $12,000).
>
>This paper --- a product of the Office of the Vice President, Development
>Economics --- was prepared as a background paper for World Development
>Report 1995 on labor. Copies of the paper are available free from the World
>Bank, 1818 H Street NW, Washington, DC 20433. Please contact Sheila Fallon,
>room N8-030, telephone 202-473-8009, fax 202-522-1153, Internet address
>sfallon at worldbank.org. (42 pages).
>