ABSTRACT
The fiscal redistribution of income from upper to lower income groups was expected to pick up secondary demand and employment effects via the impact of a different, more labor-intensive final demand bundle. In an analysis of distribution—and, for that matter, of poverty—is to be more than a measurement effort, it has to become part of our primary understanding of growth. Working with cross sections, S. Kuznets and I. Adelman and C. T. Morris found that less-developed countries (LDC) distributions are substantially worse than developed countries distributions; especially for the top 20 percent of the population, incomes are clearly more equally distributed in the relatively rich countries. The Taiwanese growth and distribution record, in brief, was one of unusually low levels of Gini coupled with unusually high rates of output growth during the 1960s. The LDC record of the last two decades is a poor basis for assessing the inevitability of a conflict between employment, distribution, and output objectives.
