Key underlying concepts of shared prosperity: insights from a literature review

“Shared prosperity”—a social objective that all nations should pursue—has gained increasing importance in the discussion of development policy. Promotion of it has been endorsed as one of two fundamental goals meant to guide the World Bank in all its endeavours. The juncture between shared prosperity (for the sake of this paper we will use the terms shared prosperity and inclusive growth interchangeably) and poverty alleviation is appealing to a growing number of scholars and practitioners. Although a subject of increasing importance, shared prosperity has been relatively less studied and less conceptualized to date. In this paper we intend to (1) study existing research on “shared prosperity” and, on the basis of this existing research (2) identify key underlying concepts of shared prosperity. On the basis of the outcomes of this study a number of guidelines are suggested for future research which may encourage further research work in this novel area of study.