The pursuit of having an appropriate level of income inequality should be viewed as one of the biggest challenges facing academic scholars as well as policy makers. Unfortunately, research on this issue is currently lacking. This study is the first to introduce the theoretical concept of targeted level of income inequality for a given size of population. By employing the World Bank’s data on population size and Gini coefficient from sixty-nine countries in 2012, this study finds that the relationship between Gini coefficient and natural logarithm of population size is nonlinear in the form of a second degree polynomial function. The estimated results using regression analysis show that the majority of countries in the sample have Gini coefficients either too high or too low compared to their appropriate values. These findings could be used as a guideline for policy makers before designing and implementing public policies in order to achieve the targeted level of income inequality.

The relationship between democracy and growth is of great importance to development of economic and social wellbeing policy but its directional causality is still generating lively debate conceptually and empirically. The paper introduces a simple simultaneous-equation model of democracy and growth for open economies and uses global data and system estimation to provide new evidence on democracy-growth causality and importantly the effects of different democratic institutions on it for strategic economic and social policy analysis. The findings confirm democracy causes growth globally but this causality is mixed for countries with heterogeneous political regimes. Regime specific policy is therefore recommended for appropriate decision-making.

South-South Trade, or more broadly South-South Cooperation, is the collaboration between developing countries of the Global South across various dimensions such as political, economic, and social issues. This paper analyses trends and developments in the trade between developing countries in contrast to other orientations of trade, focusing particularly on China and India. The paper looks at their trade flows, as well as their other activities which fall under the aegis of South-South Cooperation. Lastly, the literature on South-South Trade is reviewed to study the motivation for engaging and encouraging South-South Trade, as well as its overall effectiveness. Policy recommendations for the development of South-South Trade are made based on evidence from the study.