September 2020
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493 Reads
Piketty´s best-seller book has brought distributional issues to the fore of economic debate. This is perhaps its main contribution. Piketty centers his analysis on inequality, which, under capitalism, goes hand in hand with economic growth, according to his analysis. In my critical review of the book (Beker, 2014) I asked whether reduction of inequality or reduction of poverty should be our main concern, warning that the relationship between inequality and poverty is a rather complex one. In this paper I refer to poverty as absolute poverty, which I think is the concept that better let us analyze the situation in the low-income countries where most of the world´s population lives. The main conclusion is that because the relationship between inequality and poverty is not a simple one policies addressed to fight inequality have to take into consideration their side effects on poverty and vice versa. There is still a vast field open for research on this subject. An Addendum is devoted to the analysis of inequality and poverty after coronavirus.
