Finance and Inequality

2005

Much attention has recently been given to whether market reforms reduce or increase inequality. Inequality often reflects unequal access to productive opportunities and recent evidence has highlighted the presence of onerous barriers to entry, especially in developing countries. This paper focuses on the relationships between inequality and finance. In principle, a better financial system can help overcome barriers, and thereby increase economic growth and reduce inequality. Indeed, a more developed, that is deeper, financial sector has been shown to aid economic growth. Financial reform will only reduce inequality, however, if it improves access for more individuals with growth opportunities. Reforms thus need to broaden, not just deepen financial systems. At the same, as recent theoretical and empirical work has shown, ex ante inequality can hinder welfare enhancing reforms. Concentrated economic and political powers will likely block financial (and other) reforms, or manipulate their design and/or implementation, so that the benefits reach fewer individuals. Also, by design or implementation, financial reforms can lead risks to be allocated unfairly and costs to be socialized, especially around financial crises, further worsening inequality. Furthermore, reforms that do not provide gains for many may be followed by a political backlash that may make even valuable financial sector reforms not sustainable. We analyze these various channels from inequality to financial sector reform and provide (case) evidence on them. We then address the question, how, given initial wealth and power distributions, financial (and other) reforms could be designed such as to improve access and prevent perverse outcomes. We conclude, among others, that more gradual reform allowing the buildup of various types of oversight institutions is necessary for countries with high inequality.

2004

While substantial research finds that financial development boosts overall economic growth, we study whether financial development disproportionately raises the incomes of the poor and alleviates poverty. Using a broad cross-country sample, we distinguish among competing theoretical predictions about the impact of financial development on changes in income distribution and poverty alleviation. We find that financial development reduces income inequality by disproportionately boosting the incomes of the poor. Countries with better-developed financial intermediaries experience faster declines in measures of both poverty and income inequality. These results are robust to controlling for other country characteristics and potential reverse causality.

IMF Working Papers

Finance Research Letters, 2019

In a panel of 121 developed and developing economies, financial development promotes income equality in upper-middle income countries and inequality in low-and high-income countries. Finance impacts on income inequality through both the financial institutions and financial markets channels, though the impact of the financial institutions channel is relatively larger.

Southern Economic Journal, 2006

Although there are distinct conjectures about the relationship between finance and income inequality, little empirical research compares their explanatory power. We examine the relationship between finance and income inequality for 83 countries between 1960 and 1995. Because financial develop ment might be endogenous, we use instruments from the literature on law, finance, and growth to control for this. Our results suggest that, in the long run, inequality is less when financial development is greater, consistent with Galor and Zeira (1993) and Banerjee and Newman (1993). Although the results also suggest that inequality might increase as financial sector development increases at very low levels of financial sector development, as suggested by Greenwood and Jovanovic (1990), this result is not robust. We reject the hypothesis that financial development benefits only the rich. Our results thus suggest that in addition to improving growth, financial development also reduces inequality.

Journal of Banking, Finance and Insurance , 2024

This article attempts to analyze the nexus between financial inclusion, inequality in the distribution of financial services, economic growth and inequality by using a sample of 112 countries. It estimates financial inclusion index for the countries using a number of access and usage indicators and then investigates the linkages of such index with growth, financial inequality, and income inequality. Results show that even though Nepal has progressed a lot in expanding financial inclusion, it ranks 70 out of the 112 countries included in the study in a crosscountry context implying that more need to be done in the future to come in the forefront. In addition, results from the growth and inequality regression demonstrate that in the presence of higher inequality in the distribution of financial services, the gains from financial inclusion might not be realized as expected. This calls for the attention of the policymakers to address the inequality in financial services so that financial inclusion can contribute to higher and equitable growth.

Economies, 2022

This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY

Sustainability, 2020

Sustainable finance seeks to increase the contribution of finance to sustainable and inclusive growth. The global financial crisis of 2008 provoked the return of inequality in advanced countries to levels typical of a century ago. The aim of this paper is to empirically analyze the relationship between finance and income inequality for a group of nine OECD countries over the pre-crisis and post-crisis periods (2000–2015). The model proposed in this study simultaneously considers two explanatory variables for measuring financial depth (credit provision and capital markets) and a new multidimensional variable to measure the financial system’s resilience (a composite indicator), and conducts panel data analysis. The empirical results confirm that in terms of financial depth, the "too much finance hypothesis" holds. We also find that financial system’s resilience helps alleviate existing income inequality and that income inequality appears higher in liberal market economies th...

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2000

Although theoretical models make distinct predictions about the relation between finance and income inequality, little empirical research has been conducted to compare their relative explanatory power. We examine the relation between financial intermediary development and income inequality in a panel data set of 91 countries for the period of 1960-95. Our results provide reasonably strong evidence that inequality decreases as economies develop their financial intermediaries, consistent with Galor and Zeira (1993) and Banerjee and Newman (1993). Moreover, consistent with the insight of Kuznets, the relation between the Gini coefficient and financial intermediary development depends on the sectoral structure of the economy: a larger modern sector is associated with a smaller drop in the Gini coefficient for the same level of financial intermediary development. However, there is no evidence of an inverted-U shaped relation between financial sector development and income inequality, as suggested by Greenwood and Jovanovic (1990). The results are robust to controlling for biases introduced by simultaneity.

Journal of Comparative Economics, 2007