An Empirical Analysis of Income Inequality in 12 Asia-Pacific Countries

• Main Authors: Hung Yi-Wei, 洪宜瑋
• Other Authors: 黃瓊如
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2015
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/43655649212066063173

碩士 === 逢甲大學 === 財稅學系 === 103 === Many governments have paid attention on the issue of income inequality for a long time. Moreover, income inequality is the long-standing research subject for scholars across many countries. Especially in the recent decades, under the impact of globalization, there has been increasing more concern of income inequality. The main purpose of this study is to investigate the impacts of economic growth, education spending, and the level of democracy upon income inequality in the Asia-Pacific region and hope the empirical results is helpful for government policy makers to decrease income inequality. In this study, twelve countries in the Asia-Pacific region are selected and the data period is from 1995 to 2013. According to the Human Development Index (HDI) published by the United Nations, these countries are classified as developed and the panel vector autoregression (panel VAR) model is adopted to conduct the empirical analysis. The empirical results reveal that for twelve Asia-Pacific countries, enhancing the level of democracy reduces the income inequality but an increase in foreign direct investing causes an increase in the income inequality. For developed countries, the public education expenditures have insignificantly negative impact on the income inequality. Unlike in developed countries, increasing the education expenditures in developing countries will cause an increase in income inequality.