Inequality, Poverty, and Employment: What We Know

Interventions Économiques pour une Alternative Sociale

关键词: employment policy;    family agriculture;    industrial policy;    inequality;    labour-intensive;    public goods;   

DOI  :  10.4000/interventionseconomiques.1867

来源: DOAJ

【 摘 要 】

Enormous economic gaps exist within countries and even more so in the world as a whole. Inequality is unacceptably high in most developing countries and has, on average (weighting countries by population) been increasing for the last several decades. It has enormous social costs, partly by making poverty unnecessarily widespread and partly through other social and psychological mechanisms. The paper focuses on the causes of these gaps, the extent to which they could be justifiable on economic or other grounds and the steps governments can take to reduce them. Understanding provided by economic analysis suggests a package of policies including (especially in the more agricultural countries) land reform or other steps to achieve an equitable distribution of land, together with public support to raise productivity in the small family agricultural units; a strong and equitable educational policy; an industrial policy providing adequate incentives for relatively labour intensive activities, including support for smaller businesses outside agriculture; a set of policies to diminish the anti-poor biases of some markets and of ill-chosen forms of government intervention (e.g. unneeded red tape) against the poor; and a tax, transfer, and public goods system that lowers inequality while not significantly lowering incentives to work or pursue business enterprise. An integrated set of policies to promote the demand for labour, key to raising incomes on a broad basis, uses several of the above policies as its building blocks. Unfortunately the potentially most powerful of these policies—land reform/small farm support systems, a generally strong policy to create labour demand, and a strongly redistributive state are, in the first case politically untenable in most countries, and in the others difficult to achieve for technical as well as political reasons.

【 授权许可】

Unknown