Inequality and development: is the Kuznets curve in effect today?

The Kuznets Curve Hypothesis Checked Out on Up-To-Date Observations in African Countries

“…Therefore, for a low level of GDP per capita, the level of inequality will grow until a point is reached at which the increases in GDP per capita cause a decrease in the level of inequality. This relation initially raised by Kuznets in 1955 was found by other authors a posteriori in other studies like Anand and Kanbur (1993), Jovanovic (2017) or Martínez-Navarro (2020). With respect to the parameters obtained in the short-term estimation, these were not found to be significant, so we cannot describe any behaviour in a reasoned way.…”

“…Likewise, this expanded model, as it includes dummy variables that do not change over time, cannot be estimated through the PMG technique, since when differences are made, the observations cancel each other out. For this reason, the model will be the only one that will be estimated through the Prais–Winsten technique, which has been shown to be robust with results obtained through PMG and is an improved version of the Cochrane-Orcutt estimation, which has been shown to be robust in inequality studies as shown in Martínez-Navarro et al (2020) due to its properties with data suffering from heteroscedasticity and AR(1).…”

“…Kuznets himself in the conclusions stated “[t]he paper is perhaps 5 per cent empirical information and 95 per cent speculation, some of it possibly tainted by wishful thinking”. This statement would provoke many economists to analyse his hypothesis, finding both supporters (Barro, 2008; Greenwood and Jovanovic, 1990; Higgins and Williamson, 1999; León, 2021; Lindert, 1986; Martínez-Navarro et al, 2020; Shahbaz et al, 2015) as well as detractors who argued that there was no such relationship between inequality and development (Baymul and Sen, 2019; Castelló-Climent, 2010; Deininger and Squire, 1996,1998; Kanbur, 2017), and even some who claimed to find no relationship (Theyson and Heller, 2015; Thomas, 2015).…”

Formas de entender la desigualdad en la actualidad: Un nuevo camino Diego Martínez Navarro

“…Aquí surgió una gran cuestión, y es: Según el estudio de Kuznets (1955), y muchos otros autores que lo secundaron como Greenwood y Jovanovic (1990); Higgins y Williamson (1999); Barro (2008) y Martínez, et al (2020, sí que se observa que la desigualdad finalmente tiene una tendencia decreciente. No obstante, por otro lado, Piketty (2013) asegura que la desigualdad tenderá a aumentar ¿qué teoría tiene más validez?…”

“…Finalmente, la curva de Kuznets sobre la desigualdad continúa siendo hoy día objeto de estudio como puede verse en recientes publicaciones como Canh, et al (2020); Le, et al (2020);Martínez-Navarro, et al (2020); o Topuz y Dağdemir (2020); en estas se fundamenta que se observa la curva de Kuznets basándose en análisis empíricos, lo que implicaría que la desigualdad está tendiendo a reducirse.…”