Blog post

Income inequality through decades and books

Discussions on inequality are gathering momentum in policy and academia. One indication of this trend is the frequency of the word “income inequality”

Publishing date
12 October 2016

Frequency of using the word “income inequality” in Google’s text corpora in English, 1900-2008.

Source: Google Ngram Viewer. Note: No reliable data after 2008.

The amount of online content has increased enormously in the last decades, nevertheless we can observe that these has been a steep increase in inequality-related content from 1970-1980, followed by flat and/or declining trend throughout the following decade from 1980-1990.

However, starting from 1990s, the trend has quickly rebounded and continues to increase. Such a trend demonstrates that the discussions on inequality, distribution and fairness is likely to stay as an important topic, which in turn has large implications on directions of research and policy agenda.

About the authors

  • Uuriintuya Batsaikhan

    Uuriintuya Batsaikhan, a Mongolian citizen, has worked as an Affiliate Fellow in the area of European and Global Macroeconomics and Governance. She has a Master’s Degree from the Central European University (CEU) in Budapest and a Master of Public Policy Degree specialising in political economy, economic institutions and monetary policy from Hertie School of Governance in Berlin. Prior to joining Bruegel, she worked at UNDP in Mongolia and the German Institute for Economic Research in Berlin.

    In her Master’s thesis, she analysed access to finance of SMEs during the financial crisis using a dynamic (dis)equilibrium model of credit demand and credit supply. At CEU, she wrote on the divergent means of inflation stabilization in post-transition Poland and Estonia and assessed the role of the Currency Board Arrangement (CBA) employed in Estonia.

    Uuriintuya’s research interests include macroeconomics, banking and monetary policy, access to finance of SMEs and political economy of emerging countries.

    She speaks Mongolian, English, Russian and German.

    Declaration of interests 2016

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