Top Indian Incomes, 1922-2000

By Abhijit Banerjee, Thomas Piketty. 2005

243 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This article presents data on the evolution of top incomes and wages for 1922-2000 in India using individual tax return data. The data show that the shares of the top 0.01 percent, 0.1 percent, and 1 percent in total income shrank substantially from the 1950s to the early to mid-1980s but then rose again, so that today these shares are only slightly below what they were in the 1920s and 1930s. This U-shaped pattern is broadly consistent with the evolution of economic policy in India: From the 1950s to the early to mid-1980s was a period of "socialist" policies in India, whereas the subsequent period, starting with the rise of Rajiv Gandhi, saw a gradual shift toward more probusiness policies. Although the initial share of the top income group was small, the fact that the rich were getting richer had a nontrivial impact on the overall income distribution. Although the impact is not large enough to fully explain the gap observed during the 1990s between average consumption growth shown in National Sample Survey-based data and the national accounts-based data, it is sufficiently large to explain a nonnegligible part of it (20-40 percent).

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/260e1bbf6154fa0c581316f59ef564294e07ca95

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Citations in the corpus

WEALTH INEQUALITY: A SURVEY (2015, unknown): “…and Piketty 2014), France (Frémeaux and Piketty 2013; Piketty 2003, 2007a, 2011; Piketty et al. 2006), Germany (Fuchs-Schündeln et al. 2009); India (Banerjee and Piketty 2004, 2005; Subramanian and Jayaraj 2008), Ireland (Turner 2010), Italy (Brandolini et al. 2004, Mazzaferro and Toso 2009),…”
How Closely Do Top Income Shares Track Other Measures of Inequality (2007, unknown): “Estimates are also available for the world’s three largest developing nations: China (Piketty and Qian, 2006), India (Banerjee and Piketty, 2005) and Indonesia (Leigh and van der Eng, 2007).”
Global Income Distribution: From the Fall of the Berlin Wall to the Great Recession (2013, unknown): “Using Indian tax record data, Banerjee and Piketty (2010) find that a significant part of the discrepancy between consumption growth in national accounts and household surveys can be accounted for by underreporting of the rich.”
Global Poverty and Inequality: A Review of the Evidence (2008, background): “10 See, for example, Banerjee and Piketty (2005) and Korinek et al.”
Globalization, Poverty and Inequality: What Is the Relationship? What Can Be Done? (2006, background): “To a certain extent, the reported increase in inequality within poor nations (see Banerjee and Piketty, 2005, for India) is a consequence of this.”
Indian Income Inequality, 1922‐2015: From British Raj to Billionaire Raj? (2019, background): “Indeed, official tax tabulations were based on the entire population until the early 1990s—or based on stratified samples with sampling rates close to 100 percent for top incomes as is the case in most OECD countries, but seem to be based on uniform samples of all tax returns after this period and u”