| 来源类型 | Article |
| 规范类型 | 评论 |
| All Inequality Is Not Equal | |
| Arthur C. Brooks; Charles Wolf Jr. | |
| 发表日期 | 2008-06-02 |
| 出版年 | 2008 |
| 语种 | 英语 |
| 摘要 | The proposition that less income inequality is better and more is worse is both politically correct and widely accepted. It is increasingly central to the political discourse in some developing nations where soaring economic growth rates have made entire populations richer–but some citizens much richer than others. In China, for example, trade-fueled growth has more than tripled average real per capita income since 1990, accounting for over 75% of poverty reduction in the entire developing world. But, while celebrating this extraordinary achievement, China’s President Hu Jintao’s address to China’s 17th Party Congress in October 2007–roughly comparable to the American president’s State of the Union address–raised the alarm about rising gaps between rich and poor. Indeed, he accorded equal priority to reducing inequality as to high economic growth among China’s main goals. As President Hu formulated China’s objectives for the next decade: Does China have an “inequality problem,” compared with, say, the U.S.? To answer this question requires a look at the most widely accepted and generally useful quantitative measure of income inequality, the Gini coefficient, named for its originator, Corrado Gini, an Italian statistician in the early 20th century. This number ranges between 0 (signifying “perfect” or maximum equality), and 1 (signifying maximum inequality). The coefficient indicates the gap between two percentages: the percentage of the population, and the percentage of income received by each percentage of the population. If, say, one percent of the population receives one percent of total income, and all subsequent percentages of the population receive the corresponding percentages of total income, the Gini coefficient is 0–there is no gap between the income and the population percentages. If, at the other extreme, all of the economy’s income were acquired by a single recipient, the gap would be maximized, and the coefficient would be 1. If the coefficient approximates 0, income received by each individual (or family, or household) would be exactly the same–each percentage of the population would receive the corresponding percentage of income; the system’s survival would be jeopardized by an absence of pecuniary incentives for entrepreneurship, innovation, and productivity. If, on the other hand, the coefficient approximates 1, all of the economy’s income would be acquired by a single recipient. The system’s survival would depend precariously on the altruism of that single recipient, with the risk of revolution if altruism is insufficient! America’s Gini coefficient climbed to 0.44 from 0.39 between 1985 and 2005, fueling the current arguments in the U.S. about income inequality and perhaps favoring the political fortunes of those who advocate greater redistribution of wealth. Meanwhile, China’s coefficient rose to 0.47 from 0.35 in the past five years, according to the Asian Development Bank. China may be on its way to making the U.S. look positively egalitarian. Contrary to conventional wisdom, however, whether any specific change in the Gini coefficient closer to or farther from equality is generally “good” or “bad” cannot be judged a priori. This judgment depends on whether the strengthened incentives toward higher productivity that might be associated with a movement toward higher inequality are offset by the aggravation of social tensions that might be associated with the same movement. In turn, such a judgment is likely to depend critically on how and why the change in inequality has occurred, rather than on the magnitude of the change. For example, whether the coefficient’s change is (or is perceived to be) due to favoritism, nepotism and corruption, or instead to innovation, productivity and entrepreneurship; whether the change is viewed as earned, fair and legitimate, or instead as connived, unfair and illegitimate. In any event, the concern about inequality expressed by President Hu reflects the truth of an old Chinese proverb that “inequality, rather than want, is the cause of trouble.” Many an oligarch has lost his head after ignoring this point. With its vast geography, enormous population, rapid growth and an increasing impossibility of limiting access to outside information, some observers believe China may be or may become a political tinderbox. To ameliorate class tension through income redistribution may therefore be viewed as sensible because it will enhance prospects for political survival. This view may gain credence from the fact that most recent and violent protests against China’s ruling authorities have occurred in Tibet and western Xinjiang, two of China’s lowest income provinces. However, if an income-equalizing and redistributional approach were vigorously pursued by its top policy makers, China’s rapid economic growth might slacken. As Europe has long demonstrated, and as the U.S. may begin to experience henceforth, income equalization strategies tend to lower entrepreneurial as well as labor incentives, and can easily shave non-trivial amounts off economic growth rates. This trade-off between increased equality and economic growth is further complicated in China because it also faces a highly-expensive “modernization of national defense and the armed forces.” In his litany of goals, President Hu recognized this as another powerful resource claimant, ranking it only slightly lower in priority than equality and growth. China–known to evince no less human envy than America or Europe–may well be facing a Faustian bargain between sustaining its astounding rates of economic growth, and maintaining long-term political stability. Interestingly, few analysts of China’s economy have predicted any slowdown in Chinese growth rates over the coming decades, because, notwithstanding the “tinderbox” allusion above, they don’t consider inequality to be as much of a political danger in China as some consider it to be in the West. Depending on the extent to which Mr. Hu’s rhetoric materializes in major re-distributional policies, the alarmist scenarios we commonly hear of the U.S. being overtaken as the world’s largest economy may become increasingly unlikely if and as China’s rulers seek to placate the masses who–while growing richer–are not growing rich as quickly as the favored few. Arthur C. Brooks is a visiting scholar at AEI. Charles Wolf Jr. holds the distinguished corporate chair in international economics at the RAND Corporation and is a senior research fellow at the Hoover Institution. |
| 主题 | Society and Culture |
| 标签 | China ; equal ; income ; Inequality |
| URL | https://www.aei.org/articles/all-inequality-is-not-equal/ |
| 来源智库 | American Enterprise Institute (United States) |
| 资源类型 | 智库出版物 |
| 条目标识符 | http://119.78.100.153/handle/2XGU8XDN/245770 |
| 推荐引用方式 GB/T 7714 | Arthur C. Brooks,Charles Wolf Jr.. All Inequality Is Not Equal. 2008. |
| 条目包含的文件 | 条目无相关文件。 | |||||
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