Introduction to the special issue of Japanese Political Economy on international income inequality

This paper introduces the special edition on International Inequality. It contextualizes the papers against the background of the “new inequality literature”. This contains two broad strands: critics of the International Financial Institutions who focus on inequality between nations and those like Piketty who focus on with inequality within nations. These concerns have wider consequences, notably for scholars of the “Great Divergence” between the global South and North that followed the advent of capitalism; it is also theoretically damaging for neoclassical economics, whose standard models of Growth and Trade predict that the world market should reverse this Divergence. It identifies a number of lacunae in this literature. First, the literature does not address the relation between the two sources of inequality, though it is clear that the former has significant effects on the latter. Second, the literature does little to address the causes of inequality in general, confining itself to amassing a volume of empirical data. The contributions in this volume are dedicated to making good these absences. The introduction concludes with an analysis of the roots of the theoretical difficulties involved and calls for a concerted scholarly effort to construct superior alternatives.