Costs of economic growth: new insights on wealth and income inequalities in the post-communist countries

Abstract

We scrutinise the role of institutional, market, and financial freedoms within the occurrence of wealth and income inequalities, thus attempting to corroborate the Kuznets curve hypothesis by using general and decomposed measures. To this end, we apply an auto-regressive fixed effect framework with Driscoll Kraay standard errors to analyse the panel time series data for twelve Post-Communist economies. Our empirical results highlight that the overall economic growth provides two different implications for the income and wealth inequalities. Economic growth fosters income inequality up to a threshold point, afterwards it declines with further economic growth, thereby validating the Kuznets curve hypothesis. The decomposed analysis confirms that further economic growth surpassing the threshold level re-distributes income from the top 10% class to the bottom 50% and middle 40% classes.