Readers of the blog may be interested in a Vox piece by Tony Atkinson and Salvatore Morelli on the Chartbook of Economic Inequality. It provides a summary of changes in inequality for 25 countries (alas not including Ireland) over a 100 year period. If you follow the links you can get the data on an Excel basis or in chart format. The vox link is here http://www.voxeu.org/article/chartbook-economic-inequality.
5 replies on “Chartbook of economic inequality”
http://www.voxeu.org/article/chartbook-economic-inequality
There’s this new book as well
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/116462/family-wealth-lasts-ten-fifteen-generations
about long term, intra generational inequality, traced through the study of surnames, which would imply that straight up redistribution rather than interventionist policies is the best way to correct inequality and declining social mobility.
See also Wilhelm Krelle 1962 Verteilungstheorie
293 pages with 144 Figures and lots of equations : – )
This insightful comment by Brendan Keenan more than fills the lacuna as far as Ireland is concerned.
http://www.independent.ie/opinion/columnists/brendan-keenan/oecd-report-does-not-indicate-growing-inequality-in-society-30128908.html
fyi
‘Social exclusion
The report, Monitoring Poverty and Social Exclusion in Northern Ireland , shows that household incomes fell by an average of 9 per cent in real terms between 2006 and 2007, but incomes of households in the bottom fifth of the income range fell by far more – 16 per cent – in the same period: an average of £39 a week less to live on.
The restoration of the Stormont institutions was agreed at the St Andrews talks in October 2006 and realised in the Assembly elections of May 2007.
Over the three years to 2011/2012 – the most recent period for which figures are available – the UK poverty rate fell for children and pensioners. The main reason for this was that median incomes had fallen.
Since the poverty line is set at 60 per cent of median income, it automatically falls with the median, resulting in large numbers of people appearing to have been lifted out of poverty even when their income has merely remained steady or even decreased. (This is the basis of regular Westminster coalition claims that poverty across the UK is coming down.)
Thus the particular, dismaying significance of poverty in the North going up even as the poverty line comes down. There are now tens of thousands of people in the North with incomes which define them as living above the poverty line but who would have been deemed to be living below the line according to the measure which obtained in 2006/2007.
http://www.irishtimes.com/news/politics/peace-brings-no-dividend-to-the-poorest-in-the-north-1.1739265