REDISTRIBUTION. - In the classic division of political economy that goes back to J. B. Say (1803), still in use today, after the production and circulation of wealth, and before consumption, distribution is placed. This can be understood: either in a static sense (from which arise the various questions relating to property), or in a dynamic sense, as the apportionment of the annual product (v. INCOME) among the factors of production: enterprise, capital, labor, in the form respectively of profit, interest and wages, apart from mixed forms. The importance of distribution is evident, not only for social dynamism, but also for statistics and the fiscal system. The criteria, systems and results of the aforementioned apportionment are, in fact, not only the theoretical subject of the "distribution" chapter in treatises on political economy, but in practice form the object of the lively controversy over the structure of society, that is, over the so-called social question.
Today's criticisms of classical, or liberal, economics indeed focus in particular on distribution, generally recognized as unjust and anti-economic: hence the importance of the concept of r., a modern term by which are summed up the economic-financial mechanisms, spontaneous or forced, through which the income received by subjects privileged in any way flows partly to the benefit of individuals or categories less favored by the existing social order or by events. Instruments of spontaneous r. are the luxury expenditures of the rich (v. also LUXURY), savings. Profits and land rents, industrial extra-incomes, employed productively, as well as donations and grants on various grounds. Instruments of forced r. are in the first line fiscal impositions, which through the State flow back into financing, subsidies and assistance, or else feed public needs; then social security contributions borne by employers, economic policy measures regarding prices, wage supplements, family allowances, profit-sharing and the like (v. WAGE).
While awaiting economic and social orders inspired by greater justice, r. fulfills the task of a partial correction of the most evident imbalances that occur in the distribution of income, and allows the waiting for new times in relative tranquility. A danger lies, however, in lazy accommodation to spontaneous mechanisms, and even more in blind trust in the forced ones of economic and fiscal policy, practically inexhaustible and easy to be imagined and imposed, and which normally form part of social security plans (v.). More than perfecting the systems of r., it matters therefore to diminish their present relevance, providing instead to regulate the formation of incomes according to equity through genuine competition and an exact measurement of value (v. VALUE).
For the distribution and r. of the world's natural resources, v. RAW MATERIALS.