Income Distribution at Different Levels of Development: A Survey of Evidence 108 International Labour Review 1973

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108 Int'l Lab. Rev. 97 (1973)
Income Distribution at Different Levels of Development: A Survey of Evidence

handle is hein.journals/intlr108 and id is 111 raw text is: Income Distribution at
Different Levels of
Development:
A Survey of Evidence
Felix PAUKERT1
The changing view of income distribution
T HROUGHOUT the history of mankind the idea of equality has kept
appearing, in different contexts and with a different content. It has
not been a purely, or even predominantly, economic concept. The notion
of economic equality as it appears in history is often accompanied by
notions of equality before the law, by the notion of political equality (e.g.
the principle of one man, one vote ), and by notions of social equality
(resulting, for example, in the protest against slavery).
In spite of the long-standing interest in the idea of economic equality,
there has not been any long tradition of systematic work on the concept
of income equality or on size distribution of income. The theory of
distribution, which has formed one of the main fields of economic theory
since Adam Smith, and even before him, has been primarily concerned
with distribution among factors of production-in the form of wages,
profit, rent and interest.2 Only occasionally was this analysis extended to
include distribution of income by size.
The ideal of economic equality in the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries did not find its main expression in the works of
economists (as represented by the Adam Smith, Ricardo, John Stuart
Mill school of thought) but rather in the works on the borderline of
economics and politics of people like Saint-Simon, Fourier and Robert
1 International Labour Office.
Economists before Adam Smith, particularly Quesnay and Turgot, were also interested
in distribution. Their theories were formulated primarily in terms of classes rather than factors
of production. See H. Dalton: Some aspects of the inequality of incomes in modern communi-
ties (London, George Routledge and Sons Ltd.; New York, E. P. Dutton and Co., 1920),
pp. 37-39.