Does inequality rise from above or from below? Understanding income skewness trends in 16 OECD countries, 1985-2005

Advanced industrial democracies experience increasing inequalities or at least a new trade-off between equality and growth: liberal welfare states opted for growth and accepted rising inequality, while conservative welfare states tried to hold back inequality, thereby accepting lower growth, and only the social democratic welfare states were partly able to overcome that trade-off. The rise in inequality is widely interpreted with regard to globalization and technological change. This paper contrasts this interpretation with an alternative based on the argumentation of Kuznets' inverted U-turn... Mehr ...