Income Inequality in Relation to Policies, Taxes, and Gender: A Bibliometric Analysis

The study of income inequality provides a relevant context for understanding the diversity of findings related to policies, taxes, and gender. This bibliometric study analyzed income inequality concerning current policy structures, taxes, and gender found in the literature. The global publications addressing income inequality published between (1961 – 2021) increased in the 1990’s. The production of scientific research increased steadily over time and by 2021, the number of articles grew exponentially by over 1000%. Data were collected using bibliometric tools, whereby the most productive countries, institutions, and journals were identified and mapped to the tendencies of productivity and concentration indexes. Using keywords and reference searching approaches, the resulting algorithm retrieved 16,376 scholarly articles from Scopus and World Inequality Databases. Data were mapped and the scientific analysis, yielded valuable insights into the impact of economic policies, taxes, and gender on income inequality. Our results are consistent with existing research, showing that developed countries had the highest productivity in terms of publications related to income disparity. Additionally, the data revealed that the most cited researchers were domiciled in the United States from predominantly Ivy League, or Carnegie classified Tier 1 institutions. Finally, this research is significant in the sense that it broadens the knowledge in the topic of income inequality by emphasizing the relevance of the development, authorship and domicile of the existing studies in the topic. The relevance lies in that these studies are often used as the basis for the design and implementation of government procedures, fiscal strategies, and policies that aim to reduce the income gender gap. The resulting outcome of this bibliometric paper should be considered by policy makers, institutions of higher education, universities, colleges, and libraries.