Rethinking Inequality: The Complex Dynamics Beyond the Kuznets Curve

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Dear,

I am sending comments for authors in attachment.

Best

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

Thank you for reviewing our manuscript and for allowing us the opportunity to address your comments.

We are uploading our point-by-point responses to the provided comments as given below. As per the MDPI guidelines, we are also uploading a new version of the manuscript, addressing the needed changes.

We are thankful for your constructive and valuable guidance that helped us improve our manuscript.

Best regards,

Prof. Eugene Pinsky

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Dear Editor and Authors,

 

I hope you are doing well.

the paper addresses an important topic. However, it suffers from major conceptual, methodological, and structural weaknesses. The introduction lacks coherent motivation and connection to the recent literature, the theoretical framework is underdeveloped, and there are critical methodological flaws. And the main concern is about the data used, which doesn’t match the publicly available data of the Gini index. Therefore, I recommend rejecting the manuscript in its current form. I have listed some comments that may help the authors improve their manuscript.

• The abstract is rhetorical and contains many redundant parts.
• The research gap and contribution are not clearly explained. The authors fail to show how their study contributes to the existing literature and why their study is needed.
• Many paragraphs in the introduction and literature reviews are without proper citations, with repeated statements.
• In page 4, line 137-139, the authors refer to the saving theory with incorrect citation. Please revert to the main source.
• The data source is a critical concern. In the abstract, the authors claim the data is derived from the World Bank; however, in the dataset description (p. 5), they cite the Kaggle website. A comparison with the official World Bank Gini index data reveals significant discrepancies. For example, Table 1 indicates that the U.S. Gini coefficient changes from 0.33 to 0.50 between 2000 and 2001, whereas the World Bank reports values of 0.401 and 0.406 for the same years, respectively.
• Missing reference, p.6, line 244.
• In page 8, the subheading 3.2.2 refers to Great Britain, while the description refers to United states and the figure caption states United Kingdom.
• The main results are derived using ARIMA which is a univariate analysis and cannot be used to examine the Kuznets curve.
• The authors do not explain how the Kuznets curves presented in Figure 7 were derived.
• The results and conclusions are not aligned with the analytical methods employed.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

Thank you for reviewing our manuscript and for allowing us the opportunity to address your comments.

We are uploading our point-by-point responses to the provided comments as given below. As per the MDPI guidelines, we are also uploading a new version of the manuscript, addressing the needed changes.

We are thankful for your constructive and valuable guidance that helped us improve our manuscript.

Best regards,

Prof. Eugene Pinsky

 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Everything is OK.

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

I woudl like to thank the authors for this effort. The manuscript is now good for publications