190403 - Inequality and Generating Prosperity for Working Families in Rich Countries

Seminar "Inequality and Generating Prosperity for Working Families in Rich Countries"
Organized by Sciences Po, Centre for European Studies and Comparative Politics (CEE) & Laboratory for Interdisciplinary Evaluation of Public Policies (LIEPP) (Labex ANR-11-LABX-0091, ANR-11-IDEX-0005-02)

Wednesday 3 April 2019, 12.30 - 2.30 pm, Sciences Po, Room Goguel, 27 rue Saint-Guillaume, 75007 Paris

Rising inequality has become such a widespread concern in rich countries primarily because it is seen to be associated with long-term stagnation in living standards for ordinary working households, compounded by the Great Recession. This talk presents the findings of a programme of research on inequality and performance in improving ordinary living standards over recent decades across the wealthy nations of the OECD, drawing on two recent OUP books, Inequality and Inclusive Growth in Rich Countries: Shared Challenges and Contrasting Fortunes and Generating Prosperity for Working Families in Rich Countries. It highlights the wide variation in performance in generating real income growth around and below the middle, and relates this to what happened to income inequality and economic growth. The divergence between growth in GDP and median incomes is probed. The explanatory power of widely-used country clusters/models with respect to growth in middle and lower incomes is assessed. Analysis of the underlying causal processes highlights the complexity of the impacts of globalization and technological change on wages and household incomes. By looking across this broad canvas, the findings have important lessons for how best to pursue the quest for inclusive growth and prosperity, not least in highlighting the dangers inherent in applying lessons from the US experience across the rich countries more generally.

Speaker: Brian Nolan, Director of Employment, Equity and Growth Programme, Senior Research Fellow, Nuffield College & visiting Sciences Po, CEE & LIEPP

Brian Nolan was previously Principal of the College of Human Sciences and Professor of Public Policy at University College Dublin. He has a doctorate in economics from the London School of Economics, supervised by A.B. Atkinson, and his main areas of research are income inequality, poverty, and the economics of social policy. Recent research has focused on trends in income inequality and living standards and their societal impacts across rich countries. He edited Inequality and Inclusive Growth in Rich Countries: Shared Challenges and Contrasting Fortunes and Generating Prosperity for Working Families in Rich Countries, both published by OUP in 2018.

Discussion: Bruno Palier, Sciences Po, CEE & LIEPP, CNRS

Contact: contact.cee@sciencespo.fr

Compulsory registration - For the external people to Sciences Po: You will have to arrive 10 minutes before the beginning of the seminar and to provide you with your identity papers)