Author(s): Ahmed Raza ul MUSTAFA, Asif Ali ABRO, Tariq HUSSAIN, Syed Rashid Ali
Populism rises in the milieu of political catastrophes when the political structure's status quo looks unable to reply to the populations’ needs. This phenomenon leads to inequality. Inequality becomes a familiar, burning, and perplexing spectacle. In this study, inequality is accentuated in the perspective of populism and seigniorage. Populism emphasized growth and income redeployment to reduce disparities. However, after acquiring power, their policies further rose to inflation, minimized living standards, and led to inequality. Besides this, seigniorage induces inflation. Seigniorage is an easy source for developing economies to generate finance. It further leads to inequality of income due to inflation. The period of the study is 1973-2016. Auto Regressive Distributed Lags (ARDL) approach is applied to observe the relationship between populism, seigniorage, and inequality. Both populism and seigniorage have a significant role in accelerating income inequality.