Income Inequality and Poverty Annotated Bibliography

Poverty and Income Inequality

Introduction

Poverty and income inequality draw a great deal of attention from activists, scientists, and politicians who are attempting to propose a permanent solution to these two socio-economic issues. State intervention is often anticipated in this area. There is, however, no agreement regarding the most effective instruments and techniques, as well as regarding the extent of public outlay for the sole purpose of reducing inequality and poverty. Various researches have, as an outcome, been carried out to develop the efficiency of different intervention that is intended to solve the issue of income inequality and poverty that exists in most economies, both in the developing and developed countries. Given the different challenges that are posed by income inequality and poverty within the society, together with the numerous opinions on the various proposed solutions, there is no doubt that there is a need for additional research. This paper is an annotated bibliography that aims to establish the findings by different researchers on the efficacy of the particular solutions that could be utilized in the reduction of income inequality and poverty.

Chotia, V., and Rao, N.V.M. (2017). Investigating the interlinkages between infrastructure development, poverty, and rural-urban income inequality: Evidence from BRICS nations. Studies in Economics and Finance, Vol. 34 No. 4, pp. 466-484.

To solve the issues, this particular paper advocate for the adoption of guidelines and policies that are aimed at reinforcing infrastructure as well as attaining financial growth to alleviate the present poverty levels existing in the BRICS countries. The paper aims to review the relationship between the development of infrastructure, poverty, and urban-rural income inequality for BRICS economies. PDOLS (panel dynamic ordinary least squares) and Pedroni's panel co-integration have been employed to conduct the study. The empirical results confirm a long-run association between the development of infrastructure, urban-rural inequality, and poverty. The PDOLS findings suggest that economic growth and development of infrastructure result in poverty alleviation among BRICS economies. In comparison to the other papers in this review, this is the only paper that examined a non-financial intervention. The results are linked to the fact that development of infrastructure serves to present opportunities of income generation for the impacted communities, presuming that local labor is utilized and that upon completion, the infrastructure opens up the respective community hence presenting opportunities for income generation.

Cyrek, M. (2019). Government social spending in the EU countries: efficiency in poverty and income inequality reduction. Equilibrium. Quarterly Journal of Economics and Economic Policy, 14(3), 405-424.

This paper explains the disparities in the social efficacy of government expenditures in EU nations. In general, the nations with higher social expenditure levels are also those that have lower efficacy in inequality alleviation. However, this relationship does not apply for poverty reduction. The objective of this paper is to identify the efficacy of government social expenditure in the alleviation of problems relating to income inequality and poverty in the European Union nations. To achieve the paper's main objective, the DEA technique is applied, which allows for the comparison of the social efficacy of the European Union nations. Also, the Malmquist index is determined and decomposed to identify the changes in the efficacy as well as their sources in the period of crisis. The data utilized in the investigations were obtained from OECD and Eurostat databases, and they cover the duration from 2007 to the year 2016. The study proposes some change between the degree of social expenditure and efficacy for the dimensions of inequality.

Chiazor, I. A., Egharevba, M. E., & Ozoya, M. I. (2016). Widening Inequality and Poverty in the Developing World-Micro-Financing as a Viable Solution. The Social Sciences, 11(13), 3286-3293.

Despite the broad literature on this topic, there appears to be contradicting opinions regarding the best solution to tackle the rise in inequality in the developing economies. However, one thing that experts agree on is that even though there might be other objective reasons for the increase in poverty and inequality, governments' implementation of microfinance approaches on a macro scale might be among the most efficient ways of stopping this rise. The objective of this particular study is to clarify the great capacity that microfinance has an instrument for…