John McCombie is Professor of Regional and Applied Economics in the Department of Land Economy, and Director of the Cambridge Centre for Economic and Public Policy at the University of Cambridge, UK. He is Fellow and Director of Studies of Economics and Land Economy at Downing College, Cambridge. He has previously been a member of the Department of Economics at the University of Hull, U.K. and University of Melbourne, Australia. John McCombie is a Fellow of the Regional Studies Association and a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences.

He is co-editor of Spatial Economic Analysis. His research interests are regional economics, the causes of regional and national growth rate disparities, economic growth and the balance-of-payments constraint and economic methodology in the light of the current economic crisis. He has published widely in such journals as the Economic Journal, Oxford Economic Papers, Urban Studies, Cambridge Journal of Economics, Metroeconomica, and the Journal of Post Keynesian Economics. His latest major work is the book (co-authored with Jesus Felipe) entitled The Aggregate Production Function and Technical Change. ‘Not Even Wrong’ (Edward Elgar, 2013), which is a fundamental critique of this widely used macroeconomic concept.

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Income Inequality and Growth: Problems with the Orthodox Approach

Paper Conference paper | | Mar 2015

This paper discusses the main issues about increasing inequality, whether it matters and its impact on economic activity and growth. It starts by briefly considering the empirical evidence of the share of income going to the top one percent since 1945 in the advanced countries. It then considers whether this represents an increase in the productivity of the top one percent or merely an extraction of economic rent.