Income Inequality: A Summary of the Bank's 1998 Symposium
总结了1998年美联储堪萨斯城银行举办的关于收入不平等问题的研讨会，梳理了过去二十年收入不平等的变化趋势、原因、货币政策联系及政策选项，适合关注收入分配与公共政策的研究者快速了解会议核心观点。
inequality has become an increasingly important public policy issue in industrialized countries in recent years. Although macroeconomic conditions have been favorable in many of these countries, the distribution of income within and across countries has remained uneven. In fact, in several countries, income inequality has risen. As a result, policymakers have become concerned that large segments of the population are not reaping the benefits of economic growth. To gain a better understanding of these issues, the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City sponsored a symposium titled Income Inequality: Issues and Policy Options held at Jackson Hole, Wyoming, August 27-29, 1998. The symposium brought together a distinguished group of public officials, academics, and private-sector representatives. The discussion was far-ranging and insightful. As moderator Alice Rivlin noted toward the end of the conference, while there was a divergence of opinion in several areas, there was a consensus that poverty, deprivation, and lack of opportunity are things that ought to be of great concern to us. This article summarizes the papers and commentary presented at the symposium. The first section reviews the changes in income inequality patterns over the past two decades. The second explores the reasons for these changes. Monetary policy links and the economic impact of distributional change are taken up in the following two sections. The final section considers policy options and summarizes the remarks of an overview panel. Recent Trends Alan Greenspan opened the conference by observing that distributional issues have received increased attention in recent years as several countries have experienced a widening in earnings and income inequality. While there is general agreement that technological change has been a key contributing factor-high-skilled workers as a group have prospered relative to the less-skilled-other factors may also be at work. These include evolving organizational structures and the growth in world trade. Greenspan noted that, in trying to assess the distribution of overall economic well being, trends in consumption and wealth are relevant in addition to trends in income and earnings. A central bank's goal regarding distributional issues, Greenspan asserted, is to pursue a disciplined stable-price policy that offer the best underpinnings for identifying opportunities to channel growing knowledge, innovation, and capital investment into the creation of wealth that, in turn, will lift living standards as broadly as possible. Tony Atkinson, in his paper, detailed recent income distribution trends in industrialized countries. The United States, the United Kingdom, and some other OECD countries have experienced rising income dispersion since the 1970s. The rise has been particularly marked in the UK, where the Gini coefficient, a summary measure of income differences, has increased by nearly a half. The increase in the United States has been about 10 percent. Poverty rates, defined as the proportion of households with income levels below half the national average, have also increased in some OECD countries, including the United States and the UK. Atkinson stressed, however, that there has been considerable diversity of experience across countries and, in his view, it is misleading to talk of a general trend toward increased income inequality. Atkinson also drew attention to the various components underlying the distribution of disposable household income. Individual labor earnings is a key component, but also important are income from capital, private and public transfers, taxation, and household composition. In the UK, for example, it appears that the redistributive effect of cash transfers and taxation lessened in the late 1980s, contributing to the widening of income dispersion. Macroeconomic fluctuations can also have an impact, but the links between macro variables and the distribution of income are complex and require further study. …