 We shouldn't think about the Kusnetz Curve, but I thought about it anyway because it seems like the poor country's inequality is going up, but the three million countries are sort of peaked or maybe going down. So isn't that process like structural change, homogenization of the labor market, earning education, is more equalized, sucking up over the surplus labor that is out there? Aren't that forces that help explain what's going on and might continue driving inequality down? Or what is your prediction, is it going to go up again or what? There was a question in the back, Ricardo. Thank you. Ricardo Santos from WANU Wider, I'm going to direct it to Neri, please, on Brazil. We conducted a study, it's also published as a WANU Wider paper with Nala Kibir, and we looked into a group inequalities. One of the things that we noticed compared to the beginning of Lula's mandate and the end of Mid-Dilma's was that there was a reduction in group inequality intersecting them, but there was a story on the labor market because there wasn't change in how the labor market was segmented, so there was still a concentration of least off groups, or less better off groups in the less paid occupations. What happened was that those less paid occupations got a boost because the minimum wage got higher, because of formalization of the labor market, and that kind of pinpointed that there was a limit to the reduction of inequality, a structural limit to the reduction of inequality in Brazil, and we had the hope that intergenerationally there would be something, some hope. Unfortunately, I don't think the hope was, with your information, the hope is not that obvious. So the question is, is there a floor in Brazil, or how can we break it? Okay, Luiz up here, and then one question here, and then... Hi, this is a superb session. Congratulations, Finn, and all the presenters. I have a quick question about gender inequality. There was a mixed treatment of it in the presentation. India and South Africa in particular seemed to leave it out. Pete, it would seem to me that your data set in particular could allow you to look very much at household and individual inequality and tease out some of the gender inequality, and certainly Murray, your focus on labor income, might help. And I found your focus on demographics interesting and could benefit from a gender story as well. If you have comments on, if you found something, just let, you can let me know. Let us know now, or you can tell me afterwards. Thanks, we'll take Andrea first to just finish off here. Oh, okay, you can go back there, don't worry. Which one is not? Yeah, thank you very much. My name is Bola Woutide in Nigeria, but I work in Mali with the World Vegetable Center. I want to ask a question on the presentation of Shili, basically on China. It's very interesting to me to know that, because to my own understanding, I know that poverty and income inequality are closely related and highly correlated, particularly with respect to Africa. So it's very interesting to me to know how China was able to achieve a reduction in poverty in the midst of high inequality. Thank you. Likewise, a very, very interesting session. Now, I want to start from Murray. Now, the labor market in South Africa probably is an equalizing because of the structure of the economy. The people working in the mining sector are highly paid, and the people working in the other sectors. And this, I don't know, unless the structure of the economy won't change. I mean, this is an hypothesis. Then this will stay with you forever. Now, the second question, which is... This is very optimistic. Well, I mean, I don't know. Everything happens. Now, the other thing is that there were all these corrections for tax returns. Now, I raised the question yesterday. Now, in India, there are the non-resident Indians, and they don't pay taxes in India. And in Brazil, the story of Verdi that I mentioned yesterday, according to him, the incomes of the people who hold assets abroad, it's not that they don't pay taxes in Brazil, and they don't come up in the survey. They don't pay, they don't even appear in the national income. So that's our larger day because if this is taken into account, then Zoukman and Dikumana and others have done all these efforts. And in Africa, for instance, the Nikumana says that the total assets held abroad by the Africans are equal to the total public debt of Africa. So it's a large amount of sources. And these are very unequally distributed. So if the levels of inequality in the giants may be higher. And the last point is an observation for what the Pangyol issue, may my friend issue, because in South Africa, transfers and in Brazil transfers are highly redistributed. In China, they are regressive. So there is a large, large degree of policy improvement there, I think. Thank you. Thanks a lot. Other questions? Other questions? Okay. And we'll turn to the panelists. Take them in the same order as the presentation. So Pete first, Nishi, Marcelo and then Murray. Yes, sir. Thanks, Louise. I have to apologize for not having put up a slide on gender issues, because that's clearly a critical group as well across which we can look at differences. And the evidence that we have is kind of a mixed picture. I mean, at the national level, what you're seeing is, you know, there are improvements, for example, in education outcomes and so on, the gaps between men and women are declining. But one very worrying development that's observable in the data as well is that labor force participation of women is actually declining over time in India. And this picture of a kind of, this kind of mixed picture is not just something that occurs at the aggregate level from the secondary data sources, but then there's also, there's a nuanced and very mixed picture that occurs at the very micro level as well. So it's an important dimension of inequality. It's evolving, but it doesn't seem to be diminishing as such. And the question of the non-resident Indians and the wealth that's held abroad, I guess I don't really know exactly how we should treat non-resident Indians, whether they should be part of the Indian population or they should be part of the population where they are resident. But if it's a question of the wealth that's held by Indians, that's held abroad, I mean, that I recognize is obviously something that would potentially be a big factor. And I also see how that wouldn't be captured by these tax records data. So that would remain an important omission. It might be reflected to some extent in this exercise that we haven't, I wasn't able to report on when we're looking at trying to fill in this top incomes gap by looking not at tax returns, but looking at sort of house price data and try to see if we can get a handle on sort of wealth of the very top end by looking at the house prices at the very top end of the house price distribution. So we're doing some work on that at the moment. Building on an exercise that is done along similar lines in Egypt that revealed actually a very considerable, was actually in some sense able to replicate this top end inequality component coming out of tax records, but then through house price data instead of tax records data. So possibly that might capture an element of what you're describing. I think those are the questions that were directed at me. Okay, is she? I have three questions. Yeah, first of all, Ani, you mentioned that whether what will be changed in the income equality in the future, whether we can use cost-efficient processes to predict that. You see, yeah, to answer your questions, we should look at what kinds of equalizing elements and disequalizing elements, something like that already happened in recent years. So if you just look at equalizing elements, like the migration will be continued, something like that, and there will be more and more migrants will be integrated into this urban community, something like that. Also, the government will issue small disability policies and there will be set up social network for all the population, include the rural population, something like that. So I think that will be equalized income equality in the future. Also, the government put great effort in finding the poverty in rural area, give a lot of transfer to the poor household. Yeah, I think that is positive impact on reducing the income equality. Also, we should realize some disequalizing elements, something like that. I just mentioned that it's very difficult to predict what will be happened in economic transition and political transition, something like that. You see, even a scholar proposed to reducing the government innovation in the economic activity, something like that. But it seems, you see, the government just gets stronger and stronger and more and more innovation in economic activity indeed. So corruption will be there and some red-seeking activity will be there. Also some monopoly of SOE will be there, something like that. That will have some disequalizing on the income equality, something like that. So it's hard to predict, you see, whether the income equality will decline or increase. So conservatively, I say, okay, perhaps in the next five or ten years, income equality will remain the high levels, will be, you see, quite stable, something like that. So the second question is that, you see, even China has rising income equality, also China has achieved a great process in the poverty reductions, you see. So as I mentioned that, if you just look at income growth curve, that is, even in the difference period, you will find even the lower income group still have some positive income growth. Yeah, sometimes you see the growth rate is lower than the high income group, still have maybe 4%, 3%, you see, income growth. Of course, that is for the poor household, the lower income group really benefit from income growth, just less than the high income group. So also the Chinese government put a great effort in reducing the poverty, particularly in rural areas, because the poverty is more concentrated in rural areas. So I think most important, the policy is that try to create more employment opportunity for the poor people. Also try to put more resources in the area, that is the poor people more concentrated in something like that. Just try to reduce the poverty through regional development, something like that. I think, yeah, so that is the poverty reductions take place with rising income equality. That's why. So come to third question from Angel. So yeah, if you just look at the impact of transfers on the income equality, just look at after the transfer income, something like that. It's progressive. Why? Just because most part of transfers are the urban pension, urban retired people just get very high pension indeed. So before they get pension, they are lower income group. After they get pension, they become high income group. So pension is so important. Make a big difference between income distribution before transfer income after transfer income, that is. Ok, Marcelo. So starting just a brief comment about the Kuznetz curve. Milanovic talked about the Kuznetz waves. And I think Brazil is entering maybe in a second wave. It's going up, so Brazilian are good surfers now these days. Just a small thing related with that. Interesting part between what's happening in China in the last 20 years, what happened in Brazil during the economic miracle. I think we can learn a lot about. Then going to, sorry, about informality, minimum wage. The Brazilian case, if you get all the productive attributes, not only formality, but also education, technical core, size of the firm, everything that's correlated positively with earnings. The Brazilian case when inequality was going down, there are two parts of the story. The first part is that people are moving to the better attributes, becoming more formal, getting better education from very low level, but that's part. And the second is that the big jump in earnings happen without those attributes. Not only returns of education falling, but also the informal, formal sector differential falling, etc. A key point, minimum wage explains a lot in Brazil, but also explains a lot from the fiscal problem we have now. Because in Brazil, minimum wage affects the labor market, affects the informal labor market, even more than the formal labor market. So the illegal workers, quote, unquote, follow the law. But all the pension system and employment insurance, everything follows the minimum wage. So the minimum wage is not the floor, it basically is in the medium of the distribution. It's really in the floor, is both of a media and things. So going to Andrea's point, overall, Brazil like South Africa, we have a huge transfer system, has a huge fiscal cost, but you have everything there. You have very well-target, not so well-target, very pro-rich type of transfers. And we didn't make this choice of separating the good from the not-so-good transfers. Second point with respect to, I think, your question about this money abroad, I think illustrates well a point I was raising there. So Brazil in 2015 created the opportunity of those people who have money abroad to bring it back. So you have to pay tax, I don't want to know what's the origin of those resources. So how this will impact measures of top incomes. So this change in the institutional framework may, and I think this is happening the whole time, we cannot take it face value, especially when you are looking at the change. Because something like that is going to say, well, the wealth in Brazil just exploded in the middle of a recession. Not exactly. So it's really very difficult. Just one last point on the gender issue. I think there is some work by Cecilia Machado using the same data, the impact of mother's leave on an employee of wage difference showed by gender gap. And I think that perhaps, you know, I think there is an analysis that is not only related with gender, but with the motherhood, you know, like a boss of family who give money to mothers to take advantage of altruism and to empower. So I think there is really a line of research. It was mentioned yesterday, not treat males and females as perfect substitutes in a way. And I think there are quite nice experiments to test this. Marie? So a few comments in. So the point about gender is completely right. It's not absent from our studies. It was absent from my presentation. But I think we could do much better in the stock take as a very, very interesting lens of a South Africa where we've had very low growth rates. One little brief period of nudging towards 5% from 2002 to 2008. And the impact of that with masses of females coming into the labor market, finding themselves in the informal sector, which is in our data, we've got full earnings, if you like. And so we can tell that story. And then we've got the top end of the income distribution as well through some of these matching things. So we've got a very rich way of saying how disadvantage comes through by females finding themselves in precarious work, et cetera, et cetera. Coming to Giovanni's point about the structure of the economy. Yeah, but the earnings data also show that the top end of the South African earnings distribution, you argue that their wages are set internationally. Well, it turns out that their wages are way higher than the international comparatives. So there is some sort of, there is a structural issue in South Africa. But mining has declined dramatically. Lawrence knows the story super well. He's the South African champion on this stuff. And services have increased a lot. And we've terribly worried about the skills twist, which pitches up in the earnings functions because it gets mapped onto what's been going on in the economy about the increased demand for skilled labor. And the falling away in the demand for unskilled labor at the very same time as we've got a huge unemployment problem. So it's not just an employment problem. It's an unemployment problem. And so you're right that the structure of the economy is a very important part of the story. But it's got its own particular South African manifestation, I think.