Walker et al. [113] claim that one reason why negative environmental impacts are unequally distributed could be that distributional issues have not been properly addressed in methods for assessing and evaluating policies in the UK.
To account for equity and distributional issues, a deliberate decision on how to distribute these rents could be taken and the potential failure of the CDM in meeting its goals calls for some further regulation.
The findings of a choice modelling experiment designed to estimate community preferences with respect to intergenerational utility distribution illustrate the potential of this method in addressing distributional issues.
And that's disregarding distributional issues and access and other factors.
As Rubin told me, comparing the current moment with 1993, "The distributional issues are obviously more serious now".
Twentieth-century economists lost interest in distributional issues amid the "Great Compression" that followed the second world war.
[But] these are distributional issues – people at the middle to upper end of the income scale are clearly much less effected by these issues".
We were able to swerve around the big distributional issues – and indeed the laws of politics – given the supposed end to boom and bust.
Tax increases do not have a significant effect on the likelihood of unrest, however, which suggests that distributional issues play a role in inciting public ire.
As Rubin told me, comparing the current moment with 1993, "The distributional issues are obviously more serious now". From today's vantage point, inequality looks likes a bigger problem than economic growth; fiscal discipline seems necessary but not sufficient.
This of course does nothing to question the inequality-producing mechanisms of market exchange itself, and it has also meant that the main lines of struggle have too often been focused solely on distributional issues.
