Inequality and the Elephant Curve – but is it correct?

Below is a very interesting video from the FT about the Globalisation and Income Inequality. Globalisation is often held responsible for the problems of inequality in the world today. The elephant chart seems to explain why globalization has been blamed – see below. The chart shows income growth across the globe from 1988-2008 and how middle income people across the world (e.g.China) have had a significant growth in income as have the super rich. However some income groups have suffered namely the lower middle classes who have experienced almost no growth over the last 30 years.

However the Resolution Foundation in the UK produced a paper entitled “Examining an elephant: globalisation and the lower middle class of the rich world” which focused on whether and to what extent the conclusions from the graph are justifed, by digging into the data underpinning the elephant curve.

Policy makers and commentators looking to understand how income growth has actually been experienced risk drawing the wrong, or overly- strong, conclusions without a detailed understanding of what lies behind the elephant curve. Their analysis of the underlying data shows:

1. Overall income growth is understated because of changing country selection. The chart is not about the income growth rates of particular people. For example, the globally poor in 1988 and those in 2008 are not necessarily the same groups of people – so growth doesn’t refer to individuals. But furthermore, different countries are included in the 1988 and 2008 datasets that underpin the elephant curve.
2. Uneven population shifts suppress the recorded income growth of parts of the global distribution. Population changes, rather than just income changes, have driven the income growth distribution in the elephant curve. Because the population of poorer countries has grown disproportionately, and the population share of mature economies has shrunk, average incomes have been dragged down.
3. The aggregate data hides big variation between developed economies. Further exploring the apparent losers of globalisation, the weak figures for the mature economies as a whole are driven by Japan (reflecting in part its two ‘lost decades’ of growth post-bubble, but primarily due to likely awed data) and by Eastern European states (with large falls in incomes following the collapse of the Soviet Union after 1988).