Are Inequalities Concentrated in Space? The New Issue of the Scientific Digest
Scientific digest #11
The authors of the digest (Igor Okunev, Maria Tislenko) posed a question: how space affects the distribution of inequality? To address it, they selected 10 global indicators of inequality and examined them using spatial econometrics methods.
The researchers have identified a number of key points. It turned out that inequality is a phenomenon that can be considered in various planes - gender, cultural, racial, age, and so on. However, from the point of view of global statistical accounting, the social and economic aspects of inequality are the most monitored.
The authors found that the spatial distribution of inequality as a socio-economic phenomenon can be captured using the geoeconometric methodological apparatus: the patterns of the spatial distribution of inequality were revealed, but the logic of such a distribution is non-linear.
In addition, inequality turned out to be a less “geographically concentrated” category: in particular, the hypothesis about the delimitation of countries with a lower level of socio-economic differentiation along the lines of the global North and South was not confirmed.
The results also showed that geopolitical factors and the current configuration of international relations play a less significant role compared to geographical factors, according to the Moran and Geary spatial autocorrelation coefficients.
Thus, the study concluded that socio-economic inequality is not an exclusive feature of countries with developing economies or conditionally non-Western communities. This is a positive conclusion, pointing to the limited understanding of the geographical nature of the institutional reproduction of inequality, including the framework of the path dependence theory.
NCMU Scientific Digest Project managed by Olga Voron.
Digest No. 11 is available via the link