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This is the last of five country case studies on income inequality, and looks at the case of Thailand. Following on from a number of other studies, the study attempts to re‐examine the relationships between economic growth, structural change, and income inequality in Thailand. After an introduction, the second section, Economic Growth and Structural Change, provides a broad picture of the Thai economy, and the third, Trends in Income Inequality, reviews studies on the changes in income inequality from the 1960s through to the beginning of the 1990s. The fourth section, Factors Related to Income Distribution, examines industrialization planning, industrial protection policies, regional income disparities, and the minimum wage bill over the past four decades. The fifth section, Analysis of Income Inequality in 1988, 1992, and 1996, presents an analysis income inequality in those years according to the subgroups and source decompositions of income; the final section summarizes.

Most poverty and income inequality has deep‐rooted causes that can be removed only by structural (and often slow) interventions, although it is now increasingly evident that structural adjustment, premature financial liberalization, and uncontrolled globalization can exacerbate poverty by inducing protracted recessions and macroeconomic instability. One of the dominant responses to these policy‐induced problems has been the establishment of temporary social safety nets, of which the most popular type is known as ‘social funds’; these have become a prime policy choice for offsetting the social impact of policy reform. This chapter assesses the performance of social funds, arguing that have played a minor role in containing the social costs arising from liberalization policies and in reducing the number of unemployed, ‘adjustment poor’, and ‘chronic poor’. In addition, the emphasis placed on short‐term social funds may have diverted resources and the attention of policy‐makers from the extension and reform of standing social security arrangements that may more effectively address both chronic and adjustment‐induced poverty. The six sections of the chapter are: Introduction; The Historical Context Leading to the Mass Introduction of Social Funds; Adjustment‐Related Social Funds: Scale, Scope, and Structure; Effects on Incomes, Income Distribution, and Poverty: Macroperspective; Effects on Incomes, Income Distribution, and Poverty: Microperspectives; and Conclusions and Recommendations.

This is the third of five country case studies on income inequality, and investigates the impact of financial liberalization and the rise of financial rents on income inequality in Turkey. The chapter has five sections: Introduction; Indicators of Income Distribution: The Evidence—a broad overview, and evidence on the patterns of income distribution in Turkey over the last three decades; Macroeconomic Adjustment under Financial Liberalization and the Rise of Financial Rents—a discussion of the evolution of functional categories of income that includes an account of the macroeconomic adjustment; The Rising Fiscal Gap and the Role of the State in Regulating the Distributional Structure—a detailed analysis of the rise in public sector deficits and the distributive consequences of the widening fiscal gap; and Concluding Comments and Overall Assessment. Sect. 3 looks at the inherent tensions caused by the macroeconomic disequilibria embodied in the process of integration with world markets under conditions of a poorly supervised banking system and underdeveloped and fragile domestic asset markets; here, it is found to be analytically convenient to decompose the path of Turkish liberalization after 1980 into two major subperiods partitioned by the strategic step of capital account deregulation—which took place in 1989 and was completed by the full integration of the domestic market into global financial markets. This section also studies the patterns of the wage cycle and productivity growth using quantitative filtering techniques, and reports on the disassociation of labour remunerations from the productivity gains in the real sphere of the economy.

This is the second of five country case studies on income inequality, and shows that income inequality in Venezuela has significantly worsened during the past 27 years; in particular, the worsening has taken the form not of higher inequality among workers, but of higher inequality between those who own and those who do not own capital. Factor shares (shares of factors of production) have moved decisively against labour during the last three decades, resulting in a transfer of approximately 15% of GDP from labour to capital income: the data show an average worker in the late 1990s to be roughly half as well off in terms of income as an average worker in 1970. The chapter examines several possible explanations for the change in income inequality. It has six sections: Introduction; What the data say; Factor Shares, Factor Prices, and Oil Booms—an attempt to explain the evolution of factor shares on the basis of the evolution in human and physical capital accumulation; Other Influences on Income Distribution—an examination of alternative influences on factor shares; Labour's Loss of Power and the Political Economy of Inequality—an in‐depth discussion of the loss of political power by the Venezuelan labour movement and the relationship of this with the main hypothesis presented by the chapter; and Concluding Comments. The main thrust of the explanation offered is that the increase in Venezuela's income inequality can to a great extent be traced back to the decline in the country's physical capital stock and its rigid production processes, although policies such as trade liberalization, contractionary macropolicies, and capital account convertibility have made a far from negligible additional contribution.