Thinking globally about inequality and stratification: Wages across the world, 1982–2009

There are many contending paradigms in the study of inequality and stratification, with little dialogue across empirical, methodological and theoretical divides. To bridge some of these gaps, this article presents and analyzes a new dataset on urban wages across the world. The data provide compelling evidence that national residence has been a significant and stable force shaping wage distribution. But the data also indicate that some occupations (e.g. tradable-good producers in low-wage regions) have experienced significant upward mobility. These processes highlight the need to critically reassess how the categories of ‘skilled’ and ‘unskilled’ are mobilized to justify global inequality.