Introduction
As promised last week, today’s column begins with a brief report on the only recent study that I know of, which provides a quantitative measure of the direct impact of the global economy on poverty and inequality within nations. That study was conducted by Niheer Dasandi and published earlier this year in the British academic journal New Political Economy, (Volume 19 No 2, 2014). In the interests of full disclosure I report here that I am a member of the journal’s Editorial Advisory Board.
As the author states the study aims “to conduct a multivariate regression analysis of the effect of inequality between countries on world poverty between 1980-2007, employing a new structural measure of international inequality which is created using social network analysis to calculate countries’ positions in international trade networks” for regression against their poverty rates. Proxies for these poverty rates are provided by their respective “infant mortality rates.”
Clearly it is well beyond the scope and purpose of this column to engage readers in a technical discussion of these concepts and the methodology utilized by the
