Asis Kumar Banerjee: Measuring Development: An Inequality Dominance Approach

Excerpt

The ‘consensus’ on globalization of the early 1990s confidently claimed that the high tide will lift all boats and create a world where rising prosperity will be shared by all. The strong anti-globalisation resistance the world over of the last decade has proved that claim to be largely false. Income growth has indeed been stimulated in a wide range of countries, but social unrest, far from disappearing, has also grown side by side. Rising inequality in income and wealth along with loss of livelihood at the lower ranges of the skill spectrum is the main source of this discontent. The age old question has come frontstage with renewed force: is rising average income (even at rates relatively high by pre-globalization standards) adequate for raising the ‘wellbeing’ of a nation? The sharp deceleration in globalization in the face of rising nationalism, the paralysis of the WTO and trends in dozens of social indicators in recent years emphatically say that the answer is no. The failure is not hard to understand in the light of the literature that exists on the meaning of wellbeing of individuals and nations and changes therein. …