This paper provides what we believe to be the first collection of data on social capital in the transition countries of central/eastern Europe and of the former Soviet Union. Using data from the World Values Survey 1990 and 1995 we document the degree of trust and of civic participation and find that these indicators of social capital are significantly lower than in OECD countries (Organisation...

Redistributive Preferences, Redistribution, and Inequality: Evidence from a Panel of OECD Countries This paper describes individuals’ inequality perceptions, distributional norms, and redistributive preferences in a panel of OECD countries, primarily focusing on the association between these subjective measures and the effective level of inequality and redistribution. Not surprisingly, the effe...

The paper examines the role of collective bargaining systems as a determinant of the inter-industry wage structure. It compares wage patterns of six countries: Austria, Canada, Germany, Norway, Sweden and the U.S.. We use comparable wage regressions from micro cross-sections data to calculate inequality in pay across sectors. Our findings suggest the following: First, high (low) wage sectors in...

During the last three decades, the stock of government debt has increased in most developed countries. During the same period, we also observe a significant liberalization of international financial markets and an increase in income inequality in several industrialized countries. In this paper we propose a multicountry political economy model with incomplete markets and endogenous government bo...

Governments in the OECD note rising immigration with alarm and grapple with policies aimed at selecting certain migrants and keeping out others. Economists appear to be well armed to advise governments since they are responsible for an impressive literature that examines the characteristics of individual immigrants, their absorption and the consequences of their migration on both sending and re...

During 1990’s and early 2000’s income inequality in Italy has been higher than that observed in many other OECD countries, but has not displayed any significant trend, upward or downward. For the most part, this evidence relies on summary measures of inequality. By their very nature, summary indices of inequality may not capture aspects such as multi-modalities and polarization. This paper appl...

In the literature wage inequality is commonly traced back to globalization. As this is a too loose category to be used in an empirical investigation, I will assume that globalization in the larger sense may provide an introductory explanation for a somewhat similarly wide economic variable as the labour share. In fact, as shown by on the basis of the computations conducted by Bertoli and Farina...

Shadow Economies and Corruption All Over the World: What Do We Really Know? Estimations of the size and development of the shadow economy for 145 countries, including developing, transition and highly developed OECD economies over the period 1999 to 2003 are presented. The average size of the shadow economy (as a percent of “official” GDP) in 2002/03 in 96 developing countries is 38.7%, in 25 t...

The Public Perception and Normative Valuation of Executive Compensation: An International Comparison This paper describes individuals’ perceptions and normative valuations of executive compensation using comparable survey data for fifteen OECD member countries. An overwhelming majority of individuals (more than 90%) believes that top executives earn more than they actually deserve. However, the...

The book defines three different concepts of world or inter-national inequality. The first uses unweighted countries’ GDPs per capita, the second, populationweighted GDPs per capita, the third, combines inter-national and internal income distribution to derive “true” world income distribution. According to the first and the second concept, inter-national inequality respectively increased and de...