In the introduction of Handbook of Income Distribution, Anthony Atkinson and Francois Bourguignon (2015) impressively write:

“When the first volume of the Handbook of Income Distribution was published in 2000, the subject of income inequality was not in the mainstream of economic debate—despite the long history of engagement with this issue by earlier leading economists—(omission). Fifteen years later, inequality has become very much centre stage.”

There is a good reason for that. In the period after the World War II, income distribution was primarily supposed to be an issue for developing countries and to be resolved through economic development, because in most advanced countries income inequality was in declining trends until the 1970s, i.e. in the downswing of the Kuznets Curve. Since the 1980s, the scene has been changing dramatically. In many advanced countries, especially in U.S. and U.K., income inequality has been rising sharply these decades. Furthermore, in developing and emerging countries, including two new industrial giants, China and India, which account for around 35% of the world population, income inequality is an urgent problem. Given that, economists and economic historians have been keenly interested in income distribution in recent years, and literature on this issue is growing rapidly.

Motivated by this situation in the real and academic worlds, we reconsider the dynamics of income distribution in the process of economic development. This is a classic issue that has been long and extensively studied in the field of economic history as well as development economics, but we aim at shedding a new light on it in the following three ways. First, we address this issue from a truly global perspective. Whereas existing historical studies in income distribution principally concentrate on the Western counties, we integrate the insights from China, India, Japan and South America with those from the Western countries. Second, we focus on a specific aspect of economic development, namely industrialization, which will enable us a clear comparison of those countries’ experiences. Third, we incorporate recent development of income distribution studies, including those on intergenerational income mobility. By exploring how industrialization affected the intergenerational income mobility, we will be able to advance our understandings on the long-term distributional implications of a structural change in an economy.