Income Inequality and Economic Development

Abstract

This review essay examines the economic development field's approach to the issue of income inequality—an issue that is one of the field's greatest and most enduring challenges. Only academic (or policy and research) circles pay much attention to the measurement of income inequality, and this essay reviews four recent book-length treatments of the subject. These books demonstrate that this attention tends to be greatest at the national level and rare at the local level. There is a need to instill a general concern over the issue of inequality at the local and practitioner levels of economic development as the trends of recent decades reviewed here document increasing income inequality.