Must-read: Sutirtha Bagchi and Jan Svejnar: “Does wealth inequality matter for growth?”

Must-Read: Sutirtha Bagchi and Jan Svejnar: Does wealth inequality matter for growth?: “We derive a global measure of wealth inequality from Forbes magazine’s listing of billionaires…

…and compare its effect on growth to the effects of income inequality and poverty. Our results suggest that wealth inequality has a negative relationship with economic growth, but when we control for the fact that some billionaires acquired wealth through political connections, the relationship between politically connected wealth inequality and economic growth is negative, while politically unconnected wealth inequality, income inequality, and initial poverty have no significant relationship.