Income Inequality in OECD Countries: Data and Explanations

By Anthony B. Atkinson. Social Science Research Network, 2003

339 citations recorded by the source corpus.

There is much disagreement about both the facts and the explanations of income inequality. Even if we confine attention to OECD countries, we find people arguing that there has been a great U-turn, with inequality rising sharply after its post war fall, and others who believe that the speed of change is glacial. In order to evaluate the historical record, we need data for a long run of years. The present paper reviews evidence about covering the period 1945–2001 for nine OECD countries. It is widely believed that rising inequality is attributable to technological change and to globalisation. The second part of the paper argues that these are only part of a complex story. Household incomes depend on public policy and on sources of income apart from work. What is happening at the top of the distribution may need to be explained quite differently. (JEL H0, E6)

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1de583217839d58f71e23e4c3ee75df5113ce92b

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Citations in the corpus

Has Globalisation Increased Inequality (2008, neutral): “See Kanbur (2000) and Attanasio et al. (2004).”
Distribution and Redistribution: The Shadow of the Nineteenth Century (2009, background): “100 atkinson 2003.”
Welfare regimes and welfare state outcomes in Europe (2012, background): “Since the 1960s de-industrialization (Atkinson, 2003; Iversen, 2005), increasing international competition and a rising education wage gap have created a tendency toward increasing gross income inequalities in developed countries.”
Income Inequality Influences Perceptions of Legitimate Income Differences (2017, neutral): “Income inequality in advanced industrial countries has been growing since the 1970s (Atkinson 2003), and income inequality in the United States is now at a historic high (Saez 2014, Mishel and Finio 2013).”
Entrepreneurship and income inequality (2018, neutral): “Parallel to this ‘rise of the entrepreneurial economy’ (Audretsch, 2009) scholars have noted a trend of accelerating income inequality and increasingly stratified unemployment (Atkinson, 2003; Autor, 2014; Goldthorpe, 2010).”
Price Indexes, Inequality, and the Measurement of World Poverty (2010, methodology): “This idea is further supported by the relationship between the PPP value of national poverty lines and the PPP value of per capita GDP or consumption; national poverty lines do not vary much with levels of living in the poorest countries, but beyond some cutoff—where relative poverty begins to matte”