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Global income inequality and measuring values with the world values survey

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Abstract

Over the past 30 years, nearly all countries around the world have experienced significant increase in economic freedom and globalization. Against this backdrop, our study attempts to analyse income inequality in association with variables related to beliefs, values, democratization, religion, gender equality, social capital, and subjective well-being using data from World Values Survey of 29 countries. To understand this relationship, the study used ordered probit model with its marginal effect. Findings reveal that there is a difference in percentage on opinion of individuals on income inequality within lower-middle-, upper-middle-, and high-income countries for the selected duration. The study notices that with the passage of time in general, individuals began losing faith in a higher-income inequality. Respondents with lower education level favour having opinion on lower-income inequality in their countries. The study helps in understanding how opinion on income inequality varies across countries depending upon their political–economic values, i.e. there is a strong and significant association between individuals’ opinion on income inequality and their social–political characteristics.

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Fig. 1

Source WID, 1980–2019

Fig. 2

Source World Values Survey, Authors’ Calculation

Fig. 3

Source World Values Survey, Authors’ Calculation

Fig. 4

Source World Values Survey, Authors’ Calculation

Fig. 5
Fig. 6

Source World Values Survey, Authors’ Calculation

Fig. 7

Source World Values Survey, Authors’ Calculation

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Availability of data and material

The study utilises secondary source of data freely available in the public domain through https://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/WVSEVStrend.jsp. Additionally, details from World Inequality Database https://wid.world/ have been used for the study.

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Acknowledgements

Authors express sincere gratitude to Ms. Shatarupa Dey for proofreading and editing the paper. They also like to thank Dr. Rakhi Lalwani for editing the paper. They appreciate the efforts of Mr. Darad Harsh for preparing the graphs in the paper. Finally, they would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful comments and efforts towards improving the manuscript.

Funding

This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors. The study is based on publicly available data which can be availed upon request.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Political Science, Kumaraguru College of Liberal Arts and Science, Coimbatore, 641049, India

    Prashant Kumar Choudhary

  2. Centre for Economic Studies and Policy, Institute for Social and Economic Change, Bangalore, 560072, India

    Priyanka Saharia

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  1. Prashant Kumar Choudhary
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  2. Priyanka Saharia
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Correspondence to Prashant Kumar Choudhary.

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Conflict of interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Ethical approval

Access to the data was free with no registration or payments required and survey agencies that conducted the field survey for the data collection collected prior consent from the respondents. With their main mission being facilitation of advancement of Social Sciences worldwide, the WVS aims to make sure that survey data can equally serve the needs of the academic community in all parts of the world and hence no formal ethics approval was required to carry out research from this data source.

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Appendix

Appendix

See Table 5.

Table 5 Income Share of top 10% and Bottom 50% population in selected countries, 1989–2019.
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Choudhary, P.K., Saharia, P. Global income inequality and measuring values with the world values survey. J. Soc. Econ. Dev. 25, 103–122 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40847-022-00187-z

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