The Examination of the Relationship between Macroeconomic Policies Instability and Income Distribution in Developing Countries

Income distribution is an important economic issue and there are a lot of researches that examine the relationship between macroeconomic policies and income distribution. When macroeconomic policies become volatile, some opportunities are created. Everyone who wants to utilize these opportunities must bear some costs like transaction costs. These costs deter the poor to utilize these opportunities. Therefore, with macroeconomic policy instability, income inequality becomes worse and the gap between the poor and the rich will increase.In this paper, we explore the impact of macroeconomic policy instability on the distribution of income. We use macroeconomic instability index that contains four sub-instability indices (inflation rate, public deficit to GNP ratio, external debt to GNP ratio and change in exchange rate). As an index of inequality we have used Gini coefficient. Then, we use a panel data that consists of developing countries to estimate the relationship between income inequality and macroeconomic instability. We find that greater inequality is associated with higher instability; that is, more instability cause income distribution to become more unequal. Also, unemployment has a positive effect on income inequality. This result is in accordance with theoretical expectations because unemployment could harm the poor more. Moreover, our results show that the Kuznets hypothesis is supported for the sample under study.