- Personal webpage with publications: www.paulsegal.orgedit
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The modern study of economic inequality is based on the distribution of entitlements over goods and services. But social commentators at least since Rousseau have been concerned with a different aspect of economic inequality: that it... more
The modern study of economic inequality is based on the distribution of entitlements over goods and services. But social commentators at least since Rousseau have been concerned with a different aspect of economic inequality: that it implies that one person is entitled to command another person for their own personal ends. I call this inequality as entitlements over labor. I propose to measure entitlements over labor by calculating the extent to which top income groups can afford to buy the labor of others for the purpose of their personal consumption. Unlike standard inequality measures, this measure is not welfarist, but instead has its normative basis in relations of domination, hierarchy and social status between people. I estimate entitlements over labor in three high-inequality and two low-inequality countries and argue that inequality as entitlements over labor is socially and politically salient, capturing a side of inequality neglected by standard measures.
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1 This working paper is part of an ongoing research programme on the role of oil prices in the world economy at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies. The contents of this paper are the sole responsibility of the author. They do not... more
1 This working paper is part of an ongoing research programme on the role of oil prices in the world economy at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies. The contents of this paper are the sole responsibility of the author. They do not necessarily represent the views of the Oxford Institute for
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Who benefits from oil revenues? The bitter struggles for oil nationalisation through the twentieth century bear witness to the sensitivity of this question. Now that the principle of national sovereignty over natural resources has been... more
Who benefits from oil revenues? The bitter struggles for oil nationalisation through the twentieth century bear witness to the sensitivity of this question. Now that the principle of national sovereignty over natural resources has been established, the debate has moved on from which countries should benefit from resource revenues, to who within the resource-exporting countries will benefit. Political upheavals in Venezuela and Bolivia are two dramatic examples of what can happen when a majority feel that they are not getting their fair share of their national patrimony. This question became all the more pressing during a decade of rising commodity prices, leading to record oil prices, which the global financial crisis appears to have slowed only temporarily.
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Research Interests: Economics and Inequality
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The principle that Mexican oil should benefit Mexicans as opposed to foreigners is clear, but the question of how the benefits of oil are distributed among citizens remains unaddressed.
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La desigualdad social es uno de los grandes desafios de nuestro tiempo, y en los ultimos anos ha habido un incremento substancial tanto en el trabajo academico sobre el tema como en el reconocimiento publico de su importancia. Sin... more
La desigualdad social es uno de los grandes desafios de nuestro tiempo, y en los ultimos anos ha habido un incremento substancial tanto en el trabajo academico sobre el tema como en el reconocimiento publico de su importancia. Sin embargo, a pesar de que la desigualdad es actualmente estudiada por un amplio rango de las ciencias sociales — incluyendo a economistas, sociologos, historiadores, cientistas politicos, entre otros — existen pocos estudios interdisciplinarios sustantivos que articulen las diferentes perspectivas. desarrollo del debate publico informado y restringen la implementacion de politicas publicas para combatir la desiualdad. Nuestro proyecto en curso, Faces of inequality, una colaboracion entre la Universidad King’s College de Londres, Oxfam Mexico, Periodismo CIDE y la revista mexicana Chilango, pretende llenar algunos de esos vacios.
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This paper elaborates a framework for understanding inequalities that is multi-dimensional, inter-disciplinary, and dynamic. We first clarify the conceptual relationship between individual and categorical inequalities as studied by... more
This paper elaborates a framework for understanding inequalities that is multi-dimensional, inter-disciplinary, and dynamic. We first clarify the conceptual relationship between individual and categorical inequalities as studied by economists, sociologists, and other social scientists. We then present a set of new concepts. Inequality diversion is defined as a reduction in one form of inequality that is dependent on sustaining, or worsening, another form of inequality. We show how it arises out of cases in the literature on intersectionality, and that it also characterizes the transition to increasing meritocracy, and the relationship between increasing professional female labour market participation and domestic service. Inequality re-ordering is defined as a change in categorical or group inequalities that leaves individual inequality unchanged, such as when elites become more categorically diverse without reducing their economic or social distance from non-elites. We use these co...
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This paper considers the position of the Chinese elite in both national and international contexts. I show that the Chinese elite has converged with the global elite in terms of their incomes, and that many senior Chinese executives are... more
This paper considers the position of the Chinese elite in both national and international contexts. I show that the Chinese elite has converged with the global elite in terms of their incomes, and that many senior Chinese executives are at least as well paid as their counterparts in rich countries. Their insertion into the global elite is further demonstrated by their increasing participation in the World Economic Forum. But this international convergence has been mirrored by national divergence: economic inequality has risen within China, extending the distance between elites and the rest of the population. I show that for top income groups, the relative cost of employing a median wage worker for their personal service has plummeted, increasing their entitlements over labor and thus their capacity to dominate their compatriots. This has been accompanied by a dramatic rise in the reliance of the elite on domestic workers, a traditional symbol of social inequality. Thus the convergen...
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On 9 October 2009, the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies held a one-day conference in Oxford on ‘Oil Price Volatility: Causes and Measures of Mitigation Strategies’. The conference focused on three themes: the role of fundamentals and... more
On 9 October 2009, the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies held a one-day conference in Oxford on ‘Oil Price Volatility: Causes and Measures of Mitigation Strategies’. The conference focused on three themes: the role of fundamentals and financial factors in explaining the recent sharp swings in oil prices and the marked increase in price volatility; an assessment of the plans and strategies currently pursued to dampen oil price volatility; and the potential measures that could be adopted to mitigate the impact of sharp swings in the oil price on the energy industry. The group of participants included key senior figures from government, oil companies, the financial industry, and academia. The conference was conducted under the Chatham House Rule of non-attribution. This note contains a summary of the proceedings.
This chapter investigates recent advances in our understanding of the global distribution of income, and produces the first estimates of global inequality that take into account data on the incomes of the top one percent within countries.... more
This chapter investigates recent advances in our understanding of the global distribution of income, and produces the first estimates of global inequality that take into account data on the incomes of the top one percent within countries. We discuss conceptual and methodological issues – including alternative definitions of the global distribution, the use of household surveys and national accounts data, the use of purchasing power parity exchange rates, and the incorporation of recently available data on top incomes from income tax records. We also review recent attempts to estimate the global distribution of income. Our own estimates combine household survey data with top income data, and we analyze various aspects of this distribution, including its withinand between-country components, and changes in relative versus absolute global inequality. Finally, we examine global poverty, which is identified through the lower end of the global distribution. 937 Handbook of Income Distribu...
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Oil wealth has transformed Kuwait within decades from a modest, trade-based desert emirate into a modern city-state. It has also created a relatively egalitarian economy based on an extensive distributive system that provides Kuwaiti... more
Oil wealth has transformed Kuwait within decades from a modest, trade-based desert emirate into a modern city-state. It has also created a relatively egalitarian economy based on an extensive distributive system that provides Kuwaiti citizens with essential services including free healthcare, education and social security. Therefore, the most important fact about Kuwait’s oil wealth is that it has been successfully used to benefit its citizens. This feat has been achieved through a broad distributive welfare state. Nevertheless, Kuwait’s policies of rent distribution have developed in an ad hoc manner into an uncoordinated system. Some of Kuwait’s policies of rent distribution, such as subsidizing utilities and providing public employment, have resulted in substantial distortions, inefficiencies and institutional deficiencies, and thus there remains substantial scope for improvement.
Research Interests: Economics, Development Economics, Welfare Economics, Political Economy, Natural Resources, and 11 moreGulf Studies, Welfare State, Political Science, Arabian Gulf, Natural Resource Economics, Kuwait, International political economy of oil and gas, Politics of natural resources, Rentier State and Politics, GCC, and Natural resource curse
Historical wage and incomes data are informative both as normative measures of living standards, and as indicators of patterns of economic development. We show that, given limited historical data, median incomes are most appropriate for... more
Historical wage and incomes data are informative both as normative measures of living standards, and as indicators of patterns of economic development. We show that, given limited historical data, median incomes are most appropriate for measuring welfare and inequality, while urban unskilled wages can be used to test dualist models of development. We present a new dataset including both series in Mexico from 1800 to 2015 and find that both have historically failed to keep up with aggregate growth: per worker GDP is now over eight times higher than in the nineteenth century, while unskilled urban real wages are only 2.2 times higher, and median incomes only 2.0 times. From the perspective of inequality and social welfare, our findings confirm that there is no automatic positive relationship between economic growth and rising living standards for the majority. From the perspective of development, we argue that these findings are consistent with a dual economy model incorporating Lewis...
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The modern study of economic inequality is based on the distribution of entitlements over goods and services. But social commentators at least since Rousseau have been concerned with a different aspect of economic inequality: that it... more
The modern study of economic inequality is based on the distribution of entitlements over goods and services. But social commentators at least since Rousseau have been concerned with a different aspect of economic inequality: that it implies that one person is entitled to command another person for their own personal ends. I call this inequality as entitlements over labor. I propose to measure entitlements over labor by calculating the extent to which top income groups can afford to buy the labor of others for the purpose of their personal consumption. Unlike standard inequality measures, this measure is not welfarist, but instead has its normative basis in relations of domination, hierarchy and social status between people. I estimate entitlements over labor in three high-inequality and two low-inequality countries and argue that inequality as entitlements over labor is socially and politically salient, capturing a side of inequality neglected by standard measures. (Stone Center on...
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The international community's commitment to halve global poverty by 2015 has been enshrined in the first Millennium Development Goal. How global poverty is measured is a critical element in assessing progress towards this goal, and... more
The international community's commitment to halve global poverty by 2015 has been enshrined in the first Millennium Development Goal. How global poverty is measured is a critical element in assessing progress towards this goal, and different researchers have ...
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This article investigates structural change in Argentina between 1935 and 1960, a period of rapid industrialization and of relative decline of the agricultural sector. We use a dynamic three-sector computable general equilibrium model of... more
This article investigates structural change in Argentina between 1935 and 1960, a period of rapid industrialization and of relative decline of the agricultural sector. We use a dynamic three-sector computable general equilibrium model of the period to analyze the effects of the policies of import-substituting industrialization (ISI), and changing factor endowments, on the structure of the economy. We find that the declining land-labor ratio was more important than ISI in explaining relative stagnation in agriculture. ISI gave a substantial boost to manufacturing, but primarily at the expense of non-traded services, rather than of agriculture.
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In this paper I ask what would happen if, contrary to J. Paul Getty's prediction, mineral rights were in fact distributed more equitably. In particular, I consider the scheme under which each country taxes the rents due to their... more
In this paper I ask what would happen if, contrary to J. Paul Getty's prediction, mineral rights were in fact distributed more equitably. In particular, I consider the scheme under which each country taxes the rents due to their natural resources, and distributes this rent directly ...
This paper investigates structural change in Argentina between 1900 and 1973. It has been argued that trade policy under import% substituting indus% trialization disfavoured agriculture and led to a Vtechnological lagV in the sector, and... more
This paper investigates structural change in Argentina between 1900 and 1973. It has been argued that trade policy under import% substituting indus% trialization disfavoured agriculture and led to a Vtechnological lagV in the sector, and that this explains ...
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In this paper, we review the recent literature on global interpersonal income inequality. While all estimates agree that the level is very high, with a Gini of between 0.630 and 0.686 in the 1990s, there is no consensus regarding the... more
In this paper, we review the recent literature on global interpersonal income inequality. While all estimates agree that the level is very high, with a Gini of between 0.630 and 0.686 in the 1990s, there is no consensus regarding the direction of change. We discuss methodological issues, including the use of national accounts versus survey-based estimates of mean income (or consumption) and the choice of purchasing power parity exchange rates. Findings of a rise or fall in global income inequality are not robust across different estimation methods and datasets. Given the diversity of estimates and various sources of uncertainty, including gaps and errors in the underlying data, we conclude there is insufficient evidence to determine the direction of change in global interpersonal inequality in recent decades.
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This paper analyses the e¤ect of a resource discovery on an open economy with endogenous directed technical change. Technical progress depends on entrepreneurs who produce (or adopt) technology, and endogenously choose which sector to... more
This paper analyses the e¤ect of a resource discovery on an open economy with endogenous directed technical change. Technical progress depends on entrepreneurs who produce (or adopt) technology, and endogenously choose which sector to operate in. The static e¤ect of a resource discovery is de- industrialization and a rise in non-resource factor incomes, as in standard trade theory. Dynamically, the "brain drain" of entrepreneurs into the re- source sector may exacerbate the de-industrialization over time, but if the discovery is not su¢ ciently large then it leads to temporarily lower growth in non-resource factor incomes, which are lower in the long run than without the discovery. In this case non-resource owners are made worse off by the discov- ery. Second best trade or investment policies that direct entrepreneurs away from the resource sector may be used to raise long-run non-resource income, at a cost to GDP.
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... 2. OIL RENT AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF KUWAIT ... Infrastructure in the form of roads, harbours and an airport was key to any future growth of economic activity outside the all-dominating oil sector. ... Figure 1. Distribution of... more
... 2. OIL RENT AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF KUWAIT ... Infrastructure in the form of roads, harbours and an airport was key to any future growth of economic activity outside the all-dominating oil sector. ... Figure 1. Distribution of domestic transfers by various categories, 2008/ ...