"An invariable accompaniment of growth in developed countries is the shift away from agriculture, a process usually referred to as industrialization and urbanization. The income distribution of the total population, in the simplest model, may therefore be viewed as a combination of the income distributions of the rural and of the urban populations. What little we know of the structures of these two component income distributions reveals that: (a) the average per capita income of the rural population is usually lower than that of the urban;' (b) inequality in the percentage shares within the distribution for the rural population is somewhat narrower than in that for the urban population... Operating with this simple model, what conclusions do we reach? First, all other conditions being equal, the increasing weight of urban population means an increasing share for the more unequal of the two component distributions. Second, the relative difference in per capita income between the rural and urban populations does not necessarily drift downward in the process of economic growth: indeed, there is some evidence to suggest that it is stable at best, and tends to widen because per capita productivity in urban pursuits increases more rapidly than in agriculture. If this is so, inequality in the total income distribution should increase"
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Academics from the United StatesJews from the United StatesEconomists from the United StatesNobel laureates in EconomicsPeople from Belarus
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
p. 7 as cited in: Anthony Barnes Atkinson, François Bourguignon, Handbook of Income Distribution, Vol. 1. Elsevier, 2000 p. 799
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Simon_Kuznets
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Simon Kuznets
Simon Smith Kuznets (April 30, 1901 – July 8, 1985) was a Belarusian-American economist, statistician, demographer, and economic historian who won the 1971 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in memory of Alfred Nobel "for his empirically founded interpretation of economic growth which has led to new and deepened insight into the economic and social structure and process of development."
14 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Simon Kuznets →
Related Quotes
"The welfare of a nation can scarcely be inferred from a measurement of national income."
"Distinctions must be kept in mind between quantity and quality of growth, between its costs and return, and between t…"
"we need far more empirical study than we have had so far of the universe of inventors; any finding concerning invento…"
"The central theme of this paper is the character and causes of long-term changes in the personal distribution of inco…"
"The rural and urban populations does not necessarily drift downward in the process of economic growth: indeed, there …"
"The very fact that after a while, an increasing proportion of the urban population was "native," i.e., born in cities…"
"The paper is perhaps 5 per cent empirical information and 95 per cent speculation, some of it possibly tainted by wis…"
"[The principal characteristic of this economic epoch is] a sustained increase in per capita or per worker product, mo…"
"The inescapable conclusion is that the direct contribution of man-hours and capital accumulation would hardly account…"
"[An] epochal innovation [consisting of the] spreading application of science to processes of production and social or…"