Is Inequality Really Declining in Malaysia?

ABSTRACT

Official statistics report rapidly declining household income inequality in Malaysia during the 2000s. However, this phenomenon has passed unnoticed and unexplained, while public discourse widely asserts that inequality has either risen or remained high. In particular, salaries and wealth are perceived to be increasingly concentrated at the top. Difficulties in accessing national income survey data necessitate exploration of other data sources, which permit this article to investigate trends in personal earnings and wealth inequality. Recent information on retirement savings, as well as public sector employment and car sales, indicate earnings rising moderately or holding steady, marked by higher growth in the uppermost segments. On wealth ownership, housing sales record high growth at the top and lagging growth in the bottom half; while unit trust fund ownership suggests similar trends, particularly within the majority Bumiputera population. Our findings, while exhibiting gaps, shed some light on the state of inequality and broadly concur with public perceptions of rising or persistently high inequality. This study also underscores the multi-dimensionality of inequality and the importance of researching structural inequalities in labour and asset markets.     

The Resistible Rise of Rupert Rigsby

SINCE 1986 the number of UK households renting privately has increased from 1.85 million to 5.3 million. This private landlord renaissance has been supported by buy to let investment, tax concessions, subsidies, light touch regulation, the right to buy scheme and housing benefit. However, private landlordism makes only a small contribution to new housing supply, characterised by low quality, adds to state expenditure, increases social inequality and has a negative impact on family life. Following the stark revelation of ‘two Englands’ in the Brexit vote, ways to curb the sector's growth need to have a higher place on the political agenda.     

Force and fraud: A radically coherent criticism of corrections as industry

As radical criminology continues to gain popularity among a new generation of scholars, there are several troubling developments that ought to be met with caution. First, many emergent writings seem to take a benevolent state for granted. Second, there is a tendency to present radical ideas in a vocabulary that is so abstruse that it is difficult to decipher precisely how social change might be realized. As a remedy to these problems, this article relies on blunt language to analyze the corrections industry; by doing so, it focuses on market principles shaping key mechanisms of social control, namely force and fraud. In terms of force, the US criminal justice apparatus is too often harsh and coercive, particularly for the poor and racial minorities. Compounding matters, citizens rarely challenge such force due in large part to fraudulent governmental insistence that tough on crime initiatives are necessary to maintain public safety. Among the items discussed within this framework are public misperceptions of crime and punishment, the production of prisoners in a capitalist system, and the encouragement of excessive incarceration producing financial and ideological dividends for the state as well as the private sector.     

Income inequality,distributive unfairness,and support for democracy: evidence from East Asia and Latin America

Concern about rising economic inequality is widespread among ordinary citizens, academics, and policymakers. In particular, income inequality not only intensifies the conflicts between the rich and poor citizens but also leads to political instability. In this article, we investigate how income inequality is related to people’s support for democracy by including both objective and subjective measures of inequality. Using data collected from 28 democracies in East Asia and Latin America during 2013 and 2015, we demonstrate that inequality, measured in either a subjective or objective way, decreases with people’s satisfaction with democracy. In addition, we find that in East Asian countries, subjective measures of inequality, perceived unfairness of income inequality in particular, provide a better explanation of people’s dissatisfaction with democracy than the Gini index, a commonly used objective measure of inequality. Our findings are robust to different model specifications and offer micro-level evidence suggesting that unfair income distribution undermines the consolidation of democracies.     

A distributional theory of economic democracy

In the twentieth century, while political democracy triumphed economic democracy failed both as an idea and in practice. A case for reviving the idea of economic democracy is made in terms of protecting political democracy. Economic democracy has conventionally been understood as a matter of bringing economic power under the control of collective political power. The idea is here reformulated as a matter of redistributing economic power between persons, of giving people a share in economic power directly rather than through elected representatives. Political democracy is assumed, which is to say that political power is under the control of the middle class. The question then is under what conditions the middle class might want and think it could use political power to redistribute economic power. The conclusions are that there is in advanced capitalist democracies considerable scope for the redistribution of economic power between the rich and the middle class. As for the empowerment of the poor, however, anti-poverty policies beyond the containment of poverty are unlikely to emerge today in countries where that did not happen under earlier historical conditions.     

To have or not to have: Effects of economic inequality on turnout in European democracies

The effect of economic inequality on turnout has received considerable interest recently. Some studies suggest that inequality depresses turnout, others that the relationship is either the other way around or simply non-existent. Employing a large dataset with some 80,000 respondents from 30 European democracies, we show that great care is required when exploring inequality and turnout. On average, there is indeed a negative/positive effect of being below/above the median income in a country – but it is conditioned by inequality (measured as the Gini coefficient) and national wealth (measured as GDP per capita). Moreover, the two country-level factors interact in surprising ways. Based on our results we warn against claims of mono-causal relationships between the economic situation of voters and turnout.     

Why Do People Stigmatise the Poor at a Time of Rapidly Increasing Inequality,and What Can Be Done About It?

This paper starts out from a puzzle. During the past thirty years, incomes have grown more unequal, a small group at the top has captured a much greater share of resources and poverty has increased. Despite this, most people are markedly less likely to want government to redistribute income or tackle poverty and are less sympathetic towards those without jobs. The greater insecurity of many people's lives in the current crisis renders the issue more perplexing. This paper describes trends in inequality, poverty and unemployment; presents new data on attitudes, media discussion and political platforms; discusses theoretical approaches from social psychologists, political scientists, sociologists and other commentators; and considers how a more generous welfare state might be pursued.     

Explaining Crime in Buenos Aires: The Roles of Inequality, Unemployment, and Structural Change

Theoretical and empirical ambiguities suggest that it may be wrong to claim that unemployment increases crime, always and everywhere. Multiple regression results for Greater Buenos Aires during 1985–1997 show that inequality helps to explain crime, but unemployment does not. Moreover, unemployment fails to explain inequality. The discussion also raises some governability issues.     

Inequality,Wealth and Thailand’s Politics

ABSTRACT

Acemoglu and associates argue that resistance to democratisation will be stronger where inequality is high. Piketty shows that shifts at the upper end of the distribution may be historically more significant than overall measures of inequality. In Thailand, the high level of income inequality has eased slightly since 2000, but there is a “1% problem” as peak incomes are growing faster than the average. Newly available data show that inequality of wealth is very high. At the top of the wealth pyramid, family holdings of commercial capital are growing. A significant proportion of top entrepreneurs have emerged within the past generation. A second tier of the wealth elite has developed over the past generation from rising property values, financial investments and professional incomes. Although their individual wealth is much less than the corporate elite, their numbers are much greater. The existence of the prospering “1%” and the emergence of the second-tier wealthy may corroborate Acemoglu’s proposition, but there are tensions within the wealth elite which may favour democracy.     

Discovering sources of inequality in transition economies: a case study of rural Vietnam

Applying the recently developed inequality accounting framework, we quantify contributions of fundamental variables to consumption inequality in rural Vietnam. It is found that major determinants of the inequality include location, education, infrastructures. From 1993 to 1998, the contributions of education, physical capital, labour and community infrastructure to total inequality increased while those of land and credit access declined. Ethnicity is found to play a decreasing role in composing total inequality. Policy implications are discussed.