The past several decades have seen a significant and sustained increase in income inequality across many countries. Against this backdrop, some policymakers and economists are calling for distributive policies to address the rising inequality directly. Yet, there has been little systematic analysis of whether and how redistribution affects economic growth. To our knowledge, this is the first paper that systematically analyzes and presents evidence in a large panel of countries over 1965–2010 that redistribution can involve a non-trivial “trade-off” between equity and growth. Making it richer and more interesting, evidence also shows that the degree of trade-off between equity and growth tends to vary with the initial level of market income inequality and the size of redistribution itself. Extensive robustness checks confirm the results.

中文翻译：

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不平等，再分配和增长：平等与效率之间权衡的新证据

在过去的几十年中，许多国家的收入不平等现象持续显着增加。在这种背景下，一些政策制定者和经济学家呼吁采取分配政策来直接解决日益严重的不平等现象。但是，关于再分配是否以及如何影响经济增长的系统分析很少。据我们所知，这是第一篇论文，系统地分析并提出了1965-2010年许多国家的证据，即再分配可能涉及股权与增长之间的不平凡的“折衷”。有证据表明，使财富更丰富和更有趣的是，股权与增长之间的权衡程度往往随市场收入不平等的初始水平和再分配本身的规模而变化。广泛的鲁棒性检查确认了结果。