We live in an unequal world in which descriptors of global inequality—especially inequalities in income—abound. “[T]he world’s richest 500 individuals have a combined income greater than that of the poorest 416 million … 2.5 billion people [are] living on less than $2 a day” (Watkins et al., 2005: 18). Researchers and policy makers continue to debate how, and at what scale, inequality trends are changing, but, by any measure, the disparities between rich and poor are striking (Firebaugh, 2003; Milanovic, 2005; The Economist, 2006; Held and Kaya, 2007; Lobao et al., 2007). The recent past has also seen rapid economic globalization—characterized by the supranational spatial integration of economies and societies (Stiglitz, 2002). Globalization has intensified flows of goods, finance, people, and political/cultural interactions all across our planet (Mittelman, 2002; Dicken, 2007). Understanding the nature of, and linkages between, globalization and inequality is crucial because disparities abound in access to needs such as shelter, land, food and clean water, sustainable livelihoods, technology, and information. Inequalities in all of these realms pose challenges to human security and environmental sustainability.
Much of the research on the link between globalization and inequality has focused on the global scale—looking at inequality between countries using aggregate economic indicators such as gross domestic product per capita (sometimes weighted by national population). These measures of global inequality are limited because they implicitly assume that within-country distributions of income are perfectly equal (Milanovic, 2005). Comparisons of inequality across individuals in the global population, and across a broader range of measures, regardless of national boundaries, are much rarer, but are increasingly possible and necessary (Milanovic, 2005). Beyond the need for improved measures of global inequality, we are currently witnessing a historic change in patterns of inequality, termed by Firebaugh (2003) as the “inequality transition.” Since the 1980s, evidence suggests that inequalities have increased more rapidly within countries than between them, heralding the reversal of increasing between-country inequality—a trend that began with the Industrial Revolution (Milanovic, 2005; Held and Kaya, 2007).
Because it may seem counterintuitive that subnational inequality would grow in an era of globalization, this finding points to the importance of research on scale differences in inequality patterns, and on the spatial impacts of specific aspects of economic globalization, so that we can better understand how globalizing processes influence inequality—where and for whom (Kanbur and Venables, 2007). Addressing this problem requires research aimed at identifying how distributional mechanisms within markets and governance arrangements are shaping inequality across geographical scales and differentially distributed populations (see Lobao et al., 2007).
The timing of the recent shift in inequality patterns (the early 1980s) corresponds with the rise of new forms of economic globalization that have transformed spatial relationships around the globe. Expanding transportation and communication networks, trade liberalization, reorganization of financial structures, and the rise of new.
