Income and Wealth Disparities

12 December 2017

This Melbourne Economic Forum will highlight the income and wealth disparities in our country, with a focus on the issues tied to income inequality and the issues that arise from these disparities more generally. This forum will enliven the discussion around this critical matter and offer some new and innovative solutions to combat it.

Professor Guyonne Kalb, Professorial Fellow, Melbourne Institute of Applied and Economic Research, The University of Melbourne

Guyonne’s research compares a range of alternative poverty measures for Australia and investigates how these measures would affect our approach to defining what it means to be in poverty and under financial stress.

Dr Krishna B. Kumar, RAND, Labor and Population

Krishna is building a model that integrates childhood investments with labor market participation and outcomes to understand better the evolution of economic disparities, especially as it relates to labor earnings.

Dr Janine Dixon, Senior Research Fellow, Centre of Policy Studies, Victoria University

Modelling around the nature of recent structural changes in the job market

Dr Nhi Tran, Senior Research Fellow, Centre of Policy Studies, Victoria University

The distributional consequences of the structural changes, using general economic modelling that shows technological change has favoured some occupations over others.