Author: Hagen Koo, University of Hawai‘i at Manoa

Park Geun-hye, the current president of South Korea, pledged to rebuild the middle class and increase its size to 70 per cent of society, as part of her 2012 campaign. South Korean observers agree that this was an effective political strategy which greatly contributed to her election. In South Korea, as in many advanced economies, a major political discourse has emerged over economic polarisation and the declining middle class. Read more…

Author: Wang Feng, UC Irvine

China’s inequality story received only scant attention in Thomas Piketty’s monumental new book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Piketty drew data mostly from sources in France, Britain, the United States and, to a lesser extent, Germany, Canada, Japan, Italy and Australia. These are all countries that have large quantities of capital and long histories of capital accumulation. Read more…

Authors: Mukul G. Asher & Chang Yee Kwan, NUS

The publication of Thomas Piketty’s 2014 book Capital in the 21st Century has brought the issue of income inequality to the fore of public policy debates in many countries. This is remarkable, given the book’s length (696 pages), the intricacy of the historical data series that forms the statistical foundations of the book’s main propositions, and its relatively narrow geographical focus (mainly the US, the UK, and Western Europe). Read more…