<p>More than 26,000 children under the age of 5 die every day on average, mostly in the developing world. Malnutrition accounts for up to half of those deaths, and diarrheal diseases account for another 17 per cent. The concentration of child malnutrition and diarrhea in developing countries should be of particular interest to sociologists because of the potential role of macro, structural and institutional forces in accounting for such cross-national disparities. This study focuses on country-level development, gender inequality, and democracy as three dimensions of structural violence that have important effects on child health in developing countries. In addition, the analysis also incorporates household and maternal characteristics that have already been shown to affect child health at the individual level. Using data from the Demographic and Health Surveys and several other archival sources, I conduct a multi-level analysis of young children nested in a sample of approximately 50 developing countries. Specifically, I estimate a series of hierarchical generalized linear logit models (HGLM) that predict the likelihood that a child is stunted, wasted, underweight, or has had a recent episode of diarrhea, based on a set of country- and individual-level explanatory variables. </p><p>The introduction in Chapter 1 describes the concept of "structural violence," the orienting theoretical framework for the dissertation. Chapter 2 combines several theoretical perspectives to examine the effects of household-level socioeconomic resources as well as country-level economic development, water, sanitation, health care, and education. Household wealth and maternal education are the most important predictors of child health at the individual level; whereas, GDP per capita, secondary school enrollment, and a "capability development" scale have the most robust effects at the country level. Chapter 3 focuses on women's decision-making and resource control by examining 5 aspects of gender inequality: education, employment, political participation, reproductive autonomy, and life expectancy. Taken together, the results demonstrate that child health is likely to be better in countries where women have more education, control over their reproduction, representation in national politics, as well as longer life expectancy. Finally, Chapter 4 explores the link between democracy and child health, paying particular attention to various ways of measuring democracy. Surprisingly, bivariate correlations between democracy and child health are weak, and multivariate models do not yield consistent or robust effects. Overall, this dissertation demonstrates how child health is embedded in social, political, and economic contexts of inequality larger than the individual that partially determine who faces increased health risk factors and who is protected from them.</p> / Dissertation

This dissertation is a comparative international study of attitudes towards climate change. Using multilevel models, individual level data from the 2005-2008 wave of the World Values Survey, and country level data from the 2010 Climate Risk Index and the World Bank, this research identifies the factors associated with concern for global warming and support for various environmental policies and behaviors in economically developed, transitioning, and developing countries. The first paper addresses an ongoing debate in environmental sociology about the extent to which concern for environmental problems is a result of the objective deterioration of environmental conditions or subjective values among environmentally-oriented individuals. Findings indicate that a country's recent experience with climate-related environmental disasters has little to no effect on concern for global warming. Some support is found for the subjective values explanation, especially in countries at the most advanced stage of economic development. The second paper frames climate change as an asymmetrical social dilemma and tests whether four distinct citizenship identities are associated with the odds an individual considers global warming a very serious problem. This study finds that identifying as world citizens and autonomous individuals increases the odds an individual judges global warming very serious, while identifying as national citizens or local community members has no relationship with evaluations of global warming. The third paper examines the impact of numerous measures of security/vulnerability on individual willingness to make environment-economy trade-offs. The data reveal that higher household incomes, residing in a country with higher per capita GDP, and higher rates of adult literacy are positively associated with prioritizing environmental protection over economic growth. However, residents of economically developing countries (or countries designated Non-Annex I by the Kyoto Protocol) are also much more likely to express willingness to donate personal income for the protection of the environment compared to residents of developed (Annex I) countries. The findings from these three studies have implications for sociological research on the relationship between economic inequality and environmental attitudes, the conditions under which international cooperation on climate is more or less likely, and the quest for climate justice.

Cette thèse porte sur la dynamique des inégalités de revenu et de pollution entre individus, à l’intérieur des pays et au niveau mondial. Plus précisément, l'objectif de ces travaux est de mieux mesurer et mieux comprendre les déterminants de la dynamique sur moyen ou long terme des inégalités de revenu à l'échelle d’un pays (chapitre I) ou au niveau mondial (chapitre II). Il s'agit également de mieux comprendre et mesurer les liens articulant les inégalités de revenu aux inégalités environnementales au niveau national (chapitre III) et mondial (chapitre IV). Enfin, la thèse discute de l’impact des indicateurs de mesure des inégalités sur l'action politique (chapitres V et VI). / Chapter I, entitled “Indian income inequality dynamics, 1922-2015: From British Raj to Billionaire Raj?” , discusses the methodological issues at stake when reconstructing historical income inequality series in a country as populated as India, but with very scarce data. The chapter shows that despite many important data limitations, one can combine tax data, surveys and national accounts in a systematic manner to reconstruct income inequality estimates robust to a wide range of alternative strategies. In the case of India, the results are striking as they reveal that income inequality is currently at its highest level since the creation of the Indian Income tax in 1922. The top 1% capture more than 22% of national income today, up from 6% in the mid-1980s, when the top 1% captured about 6% of total income. Chapter II, entitled “Building a global income distribution brick by brick” , builds on chapter I (and many other similar endeavors carried out by my colleagues at the WIL) to construct a global distribution of income based on a systematic combination of tax, survey data and national accounts. Our results are notable as some go against preconceived ideas on globalization and its impacts on economic inequality. In particular, we show that the global top 1% captured twice as much global income growth as the bottom 50% since 1980. We demonstrate that inequality increased, rather than decreased between world individuals since 1980, despite strong growth in the emerging world. In other words, rising inequality within countries was stronger than the effect of reduced inequality between countries since 1980. Looking into the future, the chapter also reveals that under “Business as Usual”, global inequality is likely to further rise (despite strong growth in emerging regions) contrary to what has been argued in academic and public debates on the matter. The Appendices to the chapter present the details of the method and reveal that our results are robust alternative strategies to account for missing data at the country level.How to move from global income inequality to global environmental inequality? A first step is to understand the role of income and non-income drivers of individual pollution levels within countries. This is the work that is discussed in Chapter III, entitled “Are younger generations higher carbon emitters than their elders?” , which focuses on the determinants of individual level CO2 emissions and focus on the role of income, technology and other factors, such as date of birth. We show that the French baby-boom generation emitted relatively more CO2 than their parents and their children, throughout their lifetime (about 20% more direct CO2 emissions). This is due to a combination of income, technological lock-in and cultural effects. Chapter IV, entitled “Carbon and inequality: From Kyoto to Paris” , builds on the results obtained in the previous chapters to construct a global distribution of carbon emissions. At the time of writing this chapter, global income inequality estimates presented in Chapter II were not available, so we had to rely on work done by other researchers to obtain global income series (Lakner and Milanovic, 2015). These were corrected with tax data and then used to reconstruct a global carbon emissions database. We show that the top 10% emitters account for about 45% of global emissions today and that twenty years ago, global inequality of carbon emissions was essentially a between-country inequality phenomena. Today, the situation is being reversed as within-country emissions inequality accounts for as much of global emissions inequality as the between-country dimension. On the basis of our results, we propose schemes to better share contributions to climate adaptation funds. The history of climate negotiations shows the extreme difficulty to implement any kinds of allocation rules to share a climate burden.

<p>Recent discussions on global climate change have brought to our attention the largely disruptive influence of human activity on the planet and its inhabitants. Moral philosophers have added to the discourse their concerns about the unprecedented environmental problem of global climate change which threatens, and increasingly so, human welfare and the stability of the planet. The circumstances should be of concern to all, including philosophers who beyond their own endeavours will be affected by climate change. There are good reasons to think that the circumstances surrounding global climate change are morally repugnant and that serious action is required to avert global catastrophe and widespread suffering.</p> <p>Our discussion will draw attention to the ethical dimensions of climate change given present knowledge about the state of the global environment and human welfare across the planet, now and into foreseeable future. My aims in this paper are twofold. First, I will provide a survey of various arguments that fit under the umbrella of climate change ethics as a way to gauge their suitability to address the wider issues that should be of concern to us. Second, by seeking to refute these arguments on a number of theoretical grounds, I will make the case that the climate change problem is best understood through a welfarist lens. Climate change is fundamentally a problem of distributive justice for present and future generations and, as such, it is of great urgency to protect human welfare over the long run.</p> <p>The main argument begins in the first chapter with an overview of climate change against the backdrop of existing realities. We will take a look at the economics and science of climate change to gain a better understanding of issue, namely its origins and implications for the planet across space and time. In subsequent chapters, we defer to a variety of principles of global and intergenerational justice which are thought to offer moral guidance for the successful resolution of the climate change problem. Having concluded in the third chapter that we must focus on considerations of distributive justice, indeed those that are ultimately but not only utilitarian, the final chapter explores the appropriateness of various mechanisms and systems which would constitute a fair global climate regime.</p> / Master of Arts (MA)

This thesis deals with the convergence of European economies in the context of the deepening global inequality in the world. The theoretical part discusses the concept of convergence and the basic theories of economic growth, explaining the convergence of economies to their steady state. This part also deals with global inequality. Different types of inequalities and methods of measurement are identified, with focus on external inequality measured by GDP per capita in purchasing power parity. The analytical part examines the development of gross domestic product of the analyzed economies. The regression analysis of beta convergence shows that the economies converge and that the inequality between them is decreasing. One part of the analytical section also clarifies the relationship between long-term growth and its determinants. The section is concluded with the regression analysis of dependence between the long-term growth and selected determinants. The analysis shows that the statistically significant main factors contributing to long-term growth in the analyzed economies are the level of investment, openness of the economy, and government capital expenditures. Foreign direct investment inflows are also an important determinant, but not statistically significant. On the other hand, long-term economic growth is negatively influenced by the rate of population growth.

This thesis consists of four separate chapters which address different aspects of inequality and income determination. The first three chapters are country-level studies which examine (1) how incomes are shaped by spatial price differences, (2) the factor income composition, and (3) enterprise size. The final chapter analyses how income inequality changed at the global level. The first chapter investigates the implications of regional price differences for earnings differentials and inequality in Germany. I combine a district-level price index with administrative earnings data from social security records. Prices have a strong equalising effect on district average wages in West Germany, but a weaker effect in East Germany and at the national level. The change in overall inequality as a result of regional price differences is small (although significant in many cases), because inequality is mostly explained by differences within rather than between districts. The second chapter is motivated by the rapid increase in top income shares in the United States since the 1980s. Using data derived from tax filings, I show that this pattern is very similar after controlling for changes in tax unit size. Over the same period as top income shares increased, the composition of these incomes changed dramatically, with the labour share rising. Using a non-parametric copula framework, I show that incomes from labour and capital have become more closely associated at the top. This association is asymmetric such that top wage earners are more likely to also receive high capital incomes, compared with top capital income recipients receiving high wages. In the third chapter, I investigate the positive cross-sectional relationship between enterprise size and earnings using panel data from Ghana. I find evidence for a significant firm size effect in matched firm-worker data and a labour force panel, even after controlling for individual fixed effects. The size effect in self-employment is stronger in the cross-section, but it is driven by individual time-invariant characteristics. The final chapter studies the global interpersonal income distribution using a newly constructed and improved database of national household surveys between 1988 and 2008. The chapter finds that the global Gini remains high and approximately unchanged at around 0.7. However, this hides a substantial change in the global distribution from a twin-peaked distribution in 1988 into a single-peaked one now. Furthermore, the regional composition of the global distribution changed, as China graduated from the bottom ranks. As a result of the growth in Asia, the poorest quantiles of the global distribution are now largely from Sub-Saharan Africa. By exploiting the panel dimension of the dataset, the analysis shows which decile-groups within countries have benefitted most over this 20-year period. In addition, the chapter presents a preliminary assessment of how estimates of global inequality are affected by the likely underreporting of top incomes in surveys.