A Centre for Public Policy-anchored international project, by Professor Hema Swaminathan as the co-lead Principal Investigator, has been selected as one of the six papers that are “representative of what economics can bring to the study of inequality”. The paper, summarizing the key findings from the project, was selected from among all the past articles published in Journal of Economic Inequality. The six selected papers have been curated in a special reissue.
Professor Swaminathan’s recent and ongoing research focuses on inequality in income and wealth distributions between men and women and its implications for welfare outcomes.
Women’s ability to accumulate wealth is often attributed to whether they have property rights; i.e., a legal personality to own and manage property. In this paper, the researchers argue that basic property rights are insufficient; whether women are able to accumulate wealth also depends upon the marital and inheritance regimes in particular contexts.
Drawing upon surveys which collected individual level ownership data in Ecuador, Ghana and the state of Karnataka in India, the researchers estimate married women’s share of couple wealth and relate it to how assets are owned within marriage as well as to different inheritance regimes and practices. In Ecuador, married women own 44 %, in Ghana, 19 %, and in Karnataka, 9%of couple wealth. Ecuador is characterized by the partial community property regime in marriage while inheritance laws provide for all children, irrespective of sex, to be treated equally, norms that are largely followed in practice. In contrast, Ghana and India are characterized by the separation of property regime which does not recognize wives’ contribution to the formation of marital property, and by inheritance practices that are strongly male biased. Reforming marital and inheritance regimes must remain a top priority if gender economic equality is to be attained.
The Journal of Economic Inequality started publishing in 2003 with three issues per year. According to Dr. Ravi Kanbur, Department of Economics, Cornell University, in his introduction to the special series, the growing supply of peer-reviewed articles on the broad theme of inequality and poverty led to an expansion to four issues a year from 2008 onwards. The 64 issues to date, he notes, have published hundreds of high quality articles and it is a tall order to select a small number from them to illustrate the interplay between research on the economics of inequality and inequality concerns in the SDGs. Many other could have been chosen, but the six articles presented in this issue are hopefully representative of what economics can bring to the study of inequality.