The growth-inequality debate revisited by rent-seeking theory: Some empirical evidence

Abstract

The growth/income inequality nexus is surrounded by theoretical as well as empirical ambiguities. These ambiguities can be lifted by focusing on the nature of inequalities and not their level. Inequalities may be the result of productive profit-seeking activities or unproductive rent-seeking activities. To re-assess empirically the growth/income inequality nexus, we first propose a strategy to approximate the nature of inequalities by an indicator of institutional quality. We propose an indicator of institutions' productivity which describes the prevalence of institutions favourable to the search for profit and institutions fostering the search for rents, and conversely. It is an indirect measure of the predominance of rent-seeking activities over profit-seeking ones, and conversely. Then, using a panel data covering the period 1990–2020 for 114 countries (88 developing countries and 26 developed countries) and relying on the two-way fixed effects technique to test our estimator, we show that countries where institutions' productivity is high, growth is positively related to income inequality. Conversely, growth is negatively related to income inequality in countries where institutions' productivity is low. There is thus a positive relationship between productive inequalities and growth in countries where profit-seeking institutions dominate the institutional setting. By analogy, in countries where rent-seeking institutions are dominant there is a negative relationship between unproductive inequalities and growth. Contrary to previous public policy recommendations, inequalities should not be tackled since they are pro-growth in countries with high levels of institutions’ productivity.