ABSTRACT

The new geography of inequality refers to the new pattern of global income inequality caused by the recent phenomenon of declining inequality across nations accompanied by rising inequality within nations. Despite a recent surge of interest in global inequality, researchers have largely overlooked its changing contour. Studies of global income inequality over the last decades of the twentieth century have been preoccupied with the problem of global divergence, that is, the presumed problem of worsening income inequality for the world as a whole. Global income inequality is the result of the interplay of multiple causes, of course, so serious analyses are unlikely to give an unqualified endorsement to the notion that globalization has automatically resulted in an explosion in global income inequality. The industrialization of richer nations in the nineteenth century and first half of the twentieth caused income inequality across nations to explode.