Financialization and Inequality in Coordinated and Liberal Market Economies

• In Event: The Politics of Inequality

Abstract

The last three decades have been a period of rising inequality in post-industrial democracies, particularly in Liberal Market Economies (LMEs)/Anglo-American countries. It has also been a period in which “financialization,” however defined, was increasing rapidly in many of these economies, again particularly the LMEs, and many scholars linked the two phenomena (see e.g. Dünhaupt 2014, Godechot 2016, Flaherty 2015). After a review of past contributions which cover a large number of alternative operationalizations of financialization, we focus on six measures which we found to be most promising in an earlier analysis testing the effects of the various measures of financialization on income share of the top 1% of income earners and the Gini index of market income of working age households. We then test the hypothesis that financialization has a stronger effect on inequality in LMEs. We find that most of the measures of financialization do indeed have stronger effects on inequality among LMEs.

Authors

• Evelyne Huber, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

• Bilyana Petrova, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

• John D. Stephens, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill