Inequality, Redistribution and Economic Growth in Asia: Do We Know What We Think We Know?

Although disparate in nature and spread across different academic disciplines, there have been countless studies exploring the determinants of economic and social development at the macro-level. Recent advances in international data consolidation offer an enticing opportunity to revisit the often contested conclusions in these different literatures and test discordant high-middle/low income cases in more encompassing pooled time-series cross-section (TSCS) regression specifications. Building on Ostry et al.'s (2014) high-profile IMF staff discussion note on the effect of inequality and redistribution on economic growth spells in 50+ countries (1975-2010), this paper explores whether such research designs can sensibly be combined with fuzzy set analysis to identify typical and deviant cases in Asia for further in-depth study. Thereby, it adds to a small but growing literature which aims to systematically combine the strengths of both pooled TSCS regression and fuzzy set analysis rather than focusing on oft-quoted epistemological and ontological divisions between these research techniques.