Neo-liberal policies and inequality: Trends and foresights (1980-2050)

The purpose of this thesis is to investigate whether neoliberal policies increased global prosperity provided convergence betweeen regions and reduced gender inequality, which implemented at first in the United States and England, then adopted by almostly all other capitalistic countries by inforcement of international organizations such as IMF, WB and WTO. Neoliberals claim that the liberalization of foreign trade and capital market, downsizing of the government and the elasticization of the labor market will conclude in increase of returen of capital and efficient distribution of factors of productions; so as a result, the prosperity and welfare of all society will go up. After deregulation and remove all barriers on the way of capital, it will flow freely to more profitable areas and regions; in additionally, in the end the process of accumulation of capital will provided, the capital-rich groups will be more rich and because of prosedure written above and with trickle down, all social groups gradually will benefit. However, in Approximately 35 years of those policies, in contrast to the claims, the growth rates that had achieved after years of World War Two never happend again; on the contrary the income and wealth of minority gruop increased incredibly, while the majority of socities lost more of their welfare. Levels of inequalities returned to the years of beginning of first World War, and many of developing countries lost their gains which had achieved in the Keynesyen period; so all those financial resources tranfered to financial institutions of the West. On the other side, a few countries which rejected neo-liberal policies and followed different economic policies have achieved signifacant improvement and prosperity. In this respect and in a historical perspective as well, after anlyzing economic and political transformation in all over the World in this period, we exposed the changes in the structures of inequlaities. Finally, we tried to foresight, if the today's economic policies will continue, what kind of global situations we will face in the near future.