Professor Carols Gradin visited Beijing Normal University and lectured on Inequality

CIID
Published: 2018/5/21 9:21:00    Updated time: 2019/1/25 9:23:50

Abstract: On 16th May 2018, Professor Carlos Gradin conducted the first lecture of the Income Inequality Lecture Series at 2:30 pm in room 1610 in the North Main Building. During this Symposium, we invited Professor Carlos Gradin, a researcher from UNU-WIDER, whose research focuses on poverty, inequality and discrimination issues in developed and developing countries, with a special focusing on inequality among different social groups such as gender, race and ethnic.
Keywords: Income Distribution;lecture

Measuring Inequality—Understanding Inequality Using Decompositions

 

The topic of the first lecture was “Measuring Inequality—Understanding Inequality Using Decompositions that primarily analysed income inequality in Mozambique”. Mozambique is located in the South of Africa and used to be among the least developed and high-debt-burdened country in extreme poverty. In 1992, Mozambique entered its democratic era with economic structure reforms firmly initiated by its government. As a result, it experienced a rapid economic recovery with an average annual growth rate of 10%. Professor Gradin used S Cure, absolute and relative indicators, Lorenz Curve and other graphs from Curve functions to help the audience understand his works. During the lecture, Professor Gradin facilitated the audience to understand the stories behind the data from different perspectives with inter-and intra-group decomposition, decomposition of different income sources, regressions and other methods. Consequently, he concluded that: Along the way, poverty reduction is accompanied by an increase in inequality, especially in recent years. Economic growth has benefited the wealthy unproportionate more and the solution to a better future for all would be the development of education.

 

Quantifying the contribution of a subpopulation to inequality ;An application to Mozambique

 

On 18^th May, Professor Carols Gradin conducted the lecture titled “Quantifying the contribution of a subpopulation to inequality; An application to Mozambique”. The lecture showed the essentialness of using subpopulation in analysing the level and trends of inequality in different countries. Through intra- and inter-group analysis, a more detailed analysis on inequality is established that quantifies the contribution of the subgroups to inequality. After that, Professor Gradin used both standard and Shapley decomposition to analyze the population sub-groups’ effect on inequality based on the RIP regression model. The empirical study on Mozambique’s consumption inequality showed that the wealthiest group had an unproportionate contribution to inequality. The contribution effect has shown an increasing trend. The Theil Index obtained from Shapley Composition also referred to a similar trend.

 

Professor Gradin utilized many graphs and charts to clearly illustrate his findings and actively engaged with the audience during the Q&A session.