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One of the most important lessons of the East Asian development experience is that “growth with equity ” is an achievable objective. In a recent study, The East Asian Miracle, the World Bank notes that the successful Asian economies are “unique in that they combine... rapid, sustained growth with highly equal income distributions ” (World Bank 1993, 8). Their experience thus appears to repudiate the view that the region’s development policy overemphasized economic growth at the expense of broader social welfare concerns. Moreover, their experience establishes the existence of a development path that is much preferred to the well-known Kuznets curve, which posits an initial rise in income inequality that is followed by a decline (Kuznets, Moore, and Spengler 1955). In this chapter we examine trends and differences in income inequality in the high performing countries of East Asia and identify important factors that influenced inequality. We begin with a brief discussion of early thinking about the determinants of income inequality and some of the practical difficulties encountered in measuring income inequality. We then turn to a closer examination of the East Asian experience. As a group, the countries of East Asia have lower income inequality than the countries of Latin America or Africa. Within the region, however, there is wide variation. In Northeast Asia income inequality is very low; whereas in Southeast Asia the level is similar to that found in Latin America and Africa