New Series

Volume 20, Number 2 (June 2011)

The Journal of Income Distribution, Volume 20, Number 2 (June 2011) is now out.

This new issue brings together a disparate and interesting, small collection of research. Returns from labor, manifesting themselves in income disparity, are a theme addressed in three different ways. Public fiscal intervention and income inequality is the focus of a fourth study. In the last article of this issue, a different empirical study is presented, examining the positive correlation between children’s savings designated for school and higher math scores.

In three of this issue's articles, labor is analysed in its connection to income distribution: across deciles (forming distinct classes), within farm families and rural sector employment, and in light of employment levels between local workers and cross-border commuters. Poverty per se is not as emphasized as the topic of low-income persistence in the cases of the less well educated, rural populaces, or less skilled workers. Each is a regional study: the first, by Lui, examines the impact of earnings variance upon an employment shift from low inequality occupations to high inequality occupations, in different production sectors, in Hong Kong; the second, by Möllers, analyses the dynamic impact of rural non-farm employment on poverty reduction and inter-household income distribution in rural Macedonia and Slovenia; and the third, by Saez-Rodrigues, explores the impact of the wage differential between local workers and cross-border commuters at the low end of the pay scale in Geneva, Switzerland.

These three articles are accompanied by two others: the third article in the issue, by Roca-Sagalés and Sala, and the fifth study, by Elliott, Jung, and Friedline. The larger macroeconomic givens of Sweden are studied in the first of these, as the setting for probing the distribution of income in connection with growth. In the second, it is analysed whether increased math scores in the case of children could be a function of their savings for school purposes, as measured with the aid of Hierarchical Linear Modeling. The former investigates to what extent the features of largest public fiscal intervention and narrowest income inequality in the world in Sweden are interconnected and whether economic growth affects and is affected by this relationship. Relative income mobility is subtly discussed by Elliott, Jung, and Friedline, as revealed in the suggestion that children’s school savings may have a stronger association with children's math scores than with either household wealth or children’s savings not designated for school.

Each of the five articles provides insights into how researchers in the field of income distribution are tackling previously persuasive hypotheses i) about the relationship between structural macroeconomic changes and their impact on income dispersion, ii) about how work per se protects families from poverty, iii) about the existence of a negative trade-off between growth and inequality, iv) about the extent to which volunteer samples are representative of a larger population, and v) about the assumption that children’s school savings have a strong association with either household wealth or children's savings not designated for school. They address refining empirical approaches and theories in connection with the goal to reduce the causes of the greatest income disparities. All of the authors’ conclusions are based on empirical results, and some offer policy implications, discussed often as an extended but important link to income distribution. Elliott, Jung, and Friedline, for example, conclude that in the United States programs which encourage child savings as a way to raise children's academic performance may be an important part of educational policy and, were they in effect for relatively young pupils, possibly in the longer run increase their relative income mobility.