Global Inequality and Global Macroeconomics

Prof. James Galbraith, Senior Scholar with the Levy Economics Institute, University of Texas

Abstract
In this paper Prof Galbraith presents evidence demonstrating that common patterns and therefore macroeconomic forces dominate changes in distributions of pay and income globally from 1963 through 1999. These forces appear to be strongly associated with the changing regime of global financial governance: the collapse of Bretton Woods in 1971-73, and the debt crisis and its aftermath, beginning in 1981-82, which led to sustained increases in within-countries inequality. The existence of policy-driven global patterns in what is widely considered to be the domain of microeconomics and national policy raises deep issues for the analysis of the evolution of inequality under globalization.



Speaker:


James K. Galbraith holds the Lloyd M. Bentsen, jr. Chair of Govern­ment/Business Relations at the Lynd­on B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, the University of Texas at Austin. He is a Senior Scholar with the Levy Economics Institute, and Chair of the Board of Econo­mists for Peace and Security­, an international association of professional econ­omists. Galbraith is the author of five books and several hundred scholarly and policy articles. He holds degrees from Harvard and Yale (Ph.D. in Economics, 1981). He studied economics as a Marshall Scholar at King's College, Cambridge, and later served on the staff of the U.S. Congress, including as Executive Director of the Joint Economic Committee. He held a Fulbright Distinguished Visiting Lectureship in China in the summer of 2001, and was named a Carnegie Scholar in 2003.

Venue: UNU-MERIT, Maastricht

close