Blackwell Reference Online

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Research on income inequality within the social sciences took off as a byproduct of income taxation. Lists were published showing how many tax-paying units during a tax year had an income of a certain size. The distribution did not look like a bell-shaped curve, but was skewed at the upper end. The description of the distribution by one parameter started with Vilfredo Pareto, and his results led to the hypothesis that this statistic was more or less the same for all times and places. Later results, using better measures like the Gini-coefficient, found differences between countries, leading to a hunt for explanations. Due to the efforts of the World Bank and the Luxemburg Income Study, quite comparable income inequality data for various countries are now available, so that hypotheses-testing is possible. Sociologists proposed basically two explanations for country-level differences in income inequality. The first invokes economic factors, the second political ones. It has been held that in more economically developed countries income inequalities are smaller. Similarly, it has also been proposed that countries with a more peripheral (as opposed to central) place in the world economy have larger income inequalities. As to political factors, it has been maintained that in highly industrialized societies a long democratic history, as well as a social democratic government, by way of ... log in or subscribe to read full text