The Blackwell Companion to Globalization

Chapter 29

World Inequality in the Twenty-first Century: Patterns and Tendencies

ROBERTO PATRICIO KORZENIEWICZ AND TIMOTHY PATRICK MORAN

General interest in patterns of economic inequality has grown significantly over the last two decades, due in large part to public concerns and debates about the distribution of winners and losers over the course of globalization – the tension involved with negotiating perceived benefits in the face of profound social and economic inequalities. In Atkinson’s (1995) often-cited line, inequality has ‘come in from the cold’, resurfacing as a fundamental concern across the social sciences. In this contribution, we summarize and critically examine some of the complex debates within the social sciences over the impact of globalization on inequality between and within nations.

While most studies have come to acknowledge the long-term rise of between-country inequality over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and that this inequality constitutes today the single most important dimension of global stratification (for example, as shown by calculating the relevant weight of between-country inequalities to overall world inequality), there is an intense debate over trends in between-country inequality over the last two decades. For some, globalization has led to rising between-country inequality while for others globalization of production has led to considerable convergence. Debates on within-country inequalities also have been intense, particularly over ...