IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/cor/louvco/2021029.html

Income Inequality, Productivity, and International Trade

Author

Listed:
  • Hsu, Wen-Tai
  • Lu, Lin
  • Picard, Pierre M.

    (Université catholique de Louvain, LIDAM/CORE, Belgium)

Abstract

This paper discusses the effect of income inequality on selection and aggregate productivity in a general equilibrium model with non-homothetic preferences. It shows the existence of a negative relationship between the number and quantity of products consumed by an income group and the earnings of other income groups. It also highlights the negative effect of mean-preserving spread of income on aggregate productivity through the softening of firms’ selection. This effect is however mitigated in the presence of international trade. In a quantitative analysis, it is shown that a too large mean-preserving spread of income may harm the rich as it raises firms’ markups on her purchases. This is contrary to the general belief that income inequality benefits the rich.

Suggested Citation

  • Hsu, Wen-Tai & Lu, Lin & Picard, Pierre M., 2021. "Income Inequality, Productivity, and International Trade," LIDAM Discussion Papers CORE 2021029, Université catholique de Louvain, Center for Operations Research and Econometrics (CORE).
    • Handle: RePEc:cor:louvco:2021029
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://dial.uclouvain.be/pr/boreal/en/object/boreal%3A254748/datastream/PDF_01/view
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. is not listed on IDEAS
    2. Pei Ting & Qian Xuefeng, 2025. "Domestic Demand Upgrading, Product Mix Adjustment, and Export Competition Strategy," China Finance and Economic Review, De Gruyter, vol. 14(3), pages 44-66.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • F12 - International Economics - - Trade - - - Models of Trade with Imperfect Competition and Scale Economies; Fragmentation
    • L11 - Industrial Organization - - Market Structure, Firm Strategy, and Market Performance - - - Production, Pricing, and Market Structure; Size Distribution of Firms

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cor:louvco:2021029. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Alain GILLIS (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/coreebe.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.