Abstract

Dataset used in World Bank Policy Research Working Paper #2876, published in World Bank Economic Review, No. 1, 2005, pp. 21-44.

The effects of globalization on income distribution in rich and poor countries are a matter of controversy. While international trade theory in its most abstract formulation implies that increased trade and foreign investment should make income distribution more equal in poor countries and less equal in rich countries, finding these effects has proved elusive. The author presents another attempt to discern the effects of globalization by using data from household budget surveys and looking at the impact of openness and foreign direct investment on relative income shares of low and high deciles. The author finds some evidence that at very low average income levels, it is the rich who benefit from openness. As income levels rise to those of countries such as Chile, Colombia, or Czech Republic, for example, the situation changes, and it is the relative income of the poor and the middle class that rises compared with the rich. It seems that openness makes income distribution worse before making it better-or differently in that the effect of openness on a country's income distribution depends on the country's initial income level.

Kind of data

Aggregate data [agg]

This dataset is about book subjects. It has 7 rows and is filtered where the books is The trickle-up economy : how we take from the poor and middle class and give to the rich. It features 10 columns including number of authors, number of books, earliest publication date, and latest publication date.

I built this dataset to answer one big question: Can people in developing regions be happier without being rich? I combined data from trusted global reports to compare happiness, education, and money in 14 South Asian and Middle Eastern countries.

What’s Inside?

• Happiness Scores (0–10 scale from the 2023 World Happiness Report)
• Education Stats: Literacy rates, school enrollment (offline), and % of people using online learning (UNESCO + government surveys)
• Money Metrics: GDP per person, average income, unemployment, and poverty rates (World Bank)
• Social Support: How much people feel helped by friends/family

Why These Countries?

• Places like India and Bangladesh have booming online education but low incomes.
• Gulf nations like Qatar and UAE are rich but score lower on social freedom.
• Afghanistan and Lebanon show how wars and crises crush happiness.

Cool Things You Can Do

1. Compare “happy poor” vs. “unhappy rich” countries:
   • Nepal (happiness = 5.269 | GDP = $1,380) vs. Saudi Arabia (happiness = 6.494 | GDP = $24,500)
2. Test if online education beats traditional schools:
   • UAE has 38.2% online learning access vs. Pakistan’s 11.8%
3. Find hidden patterns: Why does Sri Lanka have 92.3% literacy but high poverty (25.6%)?

Data Sources

• Happiness Scores: World Happiness Report 2023
• Education & Economy: World Bank and UNESCO (2023 estimates)
• Missing Data: Afghanistan’s GDP/income stats are blank due to Taliban rule.

Who Should Use This?

• Teachers studying education’s role in happiness
• Economists exploring “money vs. joy” debates
• Students learning data analysis with real-world problems

Pro Tip: Use maps to compare regions! Saudi Arabia’s happiness (6.494) is double Afghanistan’s (1.859).

Affluent Americans used to vote for Republican politicians. Now they vote for Democrats. In this paper, I show detailed evidence for this decades-in-the-making trend and argue that it has important consequences for the U.S. politics of economic inequality and redistribution. Beginning in the 1990s, the Democratic Party has won increasing shares of rich, upper-middle income, high-income occupation, and stock-owning voters. This appears true across voters of all races and ethnicities, is concentrated among (but not exclusive to) college-educated voters, and is only true among voters living in larger metropolitan areas. In the 2010s, Democratic candidates' electoral appeal among affluent voters reached above-majority levels. I echo other scholars in maintaining that this trend is partially driven by increasingly “culturally liberal” views of educated voters and party elite polarization on those issues, but I additionally argue that the evolution and stasis of the parties' respective economic policy agendas has also been a necessary condition for the changing behavior of affluent voters. This reversal of an American politics truism means that the Democratic Party's attempts to cohere around an economically redistributive policy agenda in an era of rising inequality face real barriers.

Do electorates hold governments accountable for the distribution of economic welfare? Building on the finding of “class-biased economic voting” in the United States, we examine how OECD electorates respond to alternative distributions of income gains and losses. Drawing on individual-level electoral data and aggregate election results across 15 advanced democracies, we examine whether lower- and middle-income voters defend their distributive interests by punishing governments for concentrating income gains among the rich. We find no indication that non-rich voters punish rising inequality, and substantial evidence that electorates positively reward the concentration of aggregate income growth at the top. Our results suggest that governments commonly face political incentives systematically skewed in favor of inegalitarian economic outcomes. At the same time, we find that the electorate’s tolerance of rising inequality has its limits: class biases in economic voting diminish as the income shares of the rich grow in magnitude.

With few dissenting voices, the historiography of twentieth-century British civil society has been relayed through a prism of continuing and escalating elite disengagement. Within a paradigm of declinism, academics, politicians, and social commentators have contrasted a nineteenth and early twentieth century past, offering a richness of social commitment, against a present characterized by lowering standards in urban governance and civic disengagement. Put simply, as we entered the twentieth century the right sorts of people were no longer volunteering. Yet the data for such claims is insubstantial for we lack detailed empirical studies of social trends of urban volunteering across the first fifty years of the twentieth century. This dataset fills that void. It offers details of those involved in local politics, who were magistrates or poor law guardians, or who helped manage or represent one of 34 voluntary associations serving one ‘typical’ large city - Nottingham - and the surrounding county between 1900 and 1950. The sample covers a range of voluntary activities from the smallest to the largest of charities and associations. Three quarters of people captured by the data set lived within the city boundary. The clear majority of those sampled were middle class, only 10 per cent being working class, and 1.5 per cent upper class. Within this middle class there were major disparities in wealth, income, status, lifestyle, and self-view. Broken down, about 29 per cent of the sample overall were upper middle class, 43 per cent middle middle class, and 17 per cent lower middle class. Middle-class numbers in Nottingham, at about 22.5 per cent of the population, were roughly comparable with other Northern or Midland industrial cities. Its occupational distribution also approximately mirrored that of England.

A comprehensive overview on the contents, the structure and basiccoding rules of both data files can be found in the following guide: Guide for the ISSP ´Social Inequality´ cumulation of the years 1987,1992, 1999 and 2009 Attitudes to social inequality. Themes: Importance of social background and other factors asprerequisites for personal success in society (wealthy family,well-educated parents, good education, ambitions, natural ability, hardwork, knowing the right people, political connections, person´s raceand religion, the part of a country a person comes from, gender andpolitical beliefs); chances to increase personal standard of living(social mobility); corruption as criteria for social mobility;importance of differentiated payment; higher payment with acceptance ofincreased responsibility; higher payment as incentive for additionalqualification of workers; avoidability of inequality of society;increased income expectation as motivation for taking up studies; goodprofits for entrepreneurs as best prerequisite for increase in generalstandard of living; insufficient solidarity of the average populationas reason for the persistence of social inequalities; opinion about ownsalary: actual occupational earning is adequate; income differences aretoo large in the respondent´s country; responsibility of government toreduce income differences; government should provide chances for poorchildren to go to university; jobs for everyone who wants one;government should provide a decent living standard for the unemployedand spend less on benefits for poor people; demand for basic income forall; opinion on taxes for people with high incomes; judgement on totaltaxation for recipients of high, middle and low incomes; justificationof better medical supply and better education for richer people;perception of class conflicts between social groups in the country(poor and rich people, working class and middle class, unemployed andemployed people, management and workers, farmers and city people,people at the top of society and people at the bottom, young people andolder people); salary criteria (scale: job responsibility, years ofeducation and training, supervising others, needed support for familiyand children, quality of job performance or hard work at the job);feeling of a just payment; perceived and desired social structure ofcountry; self-placement within social structure of society; number ofbooks in the parental home in the respondent´s youth (culturalresources); self-assessment of social class; level of status ofrespondent´s job compared to father (social mobility); self-employment,employee of a private company or business or government, occupation(ILO, ISCO 1988), type of job of respondent´s father in therespondent´s youth; mother´s occupation (ILO, ISCO 1988) in therespondent´s youth; respondent´s type of job in first and current(last) job; self-employment of respondent´ first job or worked forsomeone else. Demograpy: sex; age; marital status; steady life partner; education ofrespondent: years of schooling and highest education level; currentemployment status; hours worked weekly; occupation (ILO, ISCO 1988);self-employment; supervising function at work; working-type: workingfor private or public sector or self-employed; if self-employed: numberof employees; trade union membership; highest education level of fatherand mother; education of spouse or partner: years of schooling andhighest education level; current employment status of spouse orpartner; occupation of spouse or partner (ILO, ISCO 1988);self-employment of spouse or partner; size of household; householdcomposition (children and adults); type of housing; party affiliation(left-right (derived from affiliation to a certain party); partyaffiliation (derived from question on left-right placement); partypreference; participation in last election; perceived position of partyvoted for on left-right-scale; attendance of religious services;religious main groups (derived); self-placement on a top-bottom scale;region. Additionally coded: several country variables; weighting factor.

Income of individuals by age group, sex and income source, Canada, provinces and selected census metropolitan areas, annual.

The Jobs of the World Database (JWD) is a publicly available database constructed by harmonizing the available micro-datasets which contain information on jobs and labor market activities in low- and middle-income countries to create a multi-country macro-dataset. The current version of the data harmonizes census data (IPUMS) and Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS). This provides coverage of countries representing about 81 percent of the world’s population, and more than 90 percent of the population in low- and middle-income countries. The database focuses on a wide range of labor market characteristics including, but not limited to: labor force participation, type of employment (e.g., waged or self-employment), sector of employment, skill level, etc. The data also contains information about internal and external migration patterns. All these aspects can be shown as aggregate at the level of country year, but also split along different characteristics including gender, education level, age groups, urban vs rural regions, etc. A major advantage of the database is the use of detailed data about household assets and dwelling characteristics to estimate a wealth density at the household level. This density was used to create wealth quintiles which can be used to investigate the labor market characteristic for different socio-economic groups (very poor, poor, average, rich, and very rich).

The International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) is a continuous programme of cross-national collaboration running annual surveys on topics important for the social sciences. The programme started in 1984 with four founding members - Australia, Germany, Great Britain, and the United States – and has now grown to almost 50 member countries from all over the world. As the surveys are designed for replication, they can be used for both, cross-national and cross-time comparisons. Each ISSP module focuses on a specific topic, which is repeated in regular time intervals. Please, consult the documentation for details on how the national ISSP surveys are fielded. The present study focuses on questions about social inequality.
The release of the cumulated ISSP ´Social Inequality´ modules for the years 1987, 1992, 1999 and 2009 consists of two separate datasets: ZA5890 and ZA5891. This documentation deals with the main dataset ZA5890. It contains all the cumulated variables, while the supplementary data file ZA5961 contains those variables that could not be cumulated for various reasons. However, they can be matched easily to the cumulated file if necessary. A comprehensive overview on the contents, the structure and basic coding rules of both data files can be found in the following guide:

Guide for the ISSP ´Social Inequality´ cumulation of the years 1987,1992, 1999 and 2009

Social Inequality I-IV:

Importance of social background and other factors as prerequisites for personal success in society (wealthy family, well-educated parents, good education, ambitions, natural ability, hard work, knowing the right people, political connections, person´s race and religion, the part of a country a person comes from, gender and political beliefs); chances to increase personal standard of living (social mobility); corruption as criteria for social mobility; importance of differentiated payment; higher payment with acceptance of increased responsibility; higher payment as incentive for additional qualification of workers; avoidability of inequality of society; increased income expectation as motivation for taking up studies; good profits for entrepreneurs as best prerequisite for increase in general standard of living; insufficient solidarity of the average population as reason for the persistence of social inequalities; opinion about own salary: actual occupational earning is adequate; income differences are too large in the respondent´s country; responsibility of government to reduce income differences; government should provide chances for poor children to go to university; jobs for everyone who wants one; government should provide a decent living standard for the unemployed and spend less on benefits for poor people; demand for basic income for all; opinion on taxes for people with high incomes; judgement on total taxation for recipients of high, middle and low incomes; justification of better medical supply and better education for richer people; perception of class conflicts between social groups in the country (poor and rich people, working class and middle class, unemployed and employed people, management and workers, farmers and city people, people at the top of society and people at the bottom, young people and older people); salary criteria (scale: job responsibility, years of education and training, supervising others, needed support for familiy and children, quality of job performance or hard work at the job); feeling of a just payment; perceived and desired social structure of country; self-placement within social structure of society; number of books in the parental home in the respondent´s youth (cultural resources); self-assessment of social class; level of status of respondent´s job compared to father (social mobility); self-employment, employee of a private company or business or government, occupation (ILO, ISCO 1988), type of job of respondent´s father in the respondent´s youth; mother´s occupation (ILO, ISCO 1988) in the respondent´s youth; respondent´s type of job in first and current (last) job; self-employment of respondent´ first job or worked for someone else.

Demograpy: sex; age; marital status; steady life partner; education of respondent: years of schooling and highest education level; current employment status; hours worked weekly; occupation (ILO, ISCO 1988); self-employment; supervising function at work; working-type: working for private or public sector or self-employed; if self-employed: number of employees; trade union membership; highest education level of father and mother; education of spouse or partner: years of schooling and highest education level; current employment status of spouse or partner; occupation of spouse or partner (ILO, ISCO 1988); self-employment of spouse or partner; size of household; household composition (children and adults); type of housing;...

A dataset listing the richest zip codes in West Virginia per the most current US Census data, including information on rank and average income.

A dataset listing the richest zip codes in New Jersey per the most current US Census data, including information on rank and average income.