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We combine all available household surveys, income tax and national accounts data in a systematic manner to produce comparable pretax and posttax income inequality series in 38 European countries between 1980 and 2017. Our estimates are consistent with macroeconomic growth rates and comparable with US Distributional National Accounts. We find that inequalities rose in most European countries since 1980 both before and after taxes, but much less than in the US. Between 1980 and 2017, the European top 1% pretax income share rose from 8% to 11% while it rose from 11% to 21% in the US. Europe’s lower inequality levels are mainly explained by a more equal distribution ofpretax incomes rather than by more equalizing taxes and transfers systems. “Predistribution” is found to play a much larger role in explaining Europe’s relative resistance to inequality than “redistribution”: it accounts for between two-thirds and

This repository suppliesdata and figure code for all figures in manuscript and supplementary information of the article titled "Potential pension fund losses should not deter high-income countries from bold climate action"

In this paper, we mobilize newly available historical series from the World Inequality Database to construct world income distribution estimates from 1820 to 2020. We find that the level of global income inequality has always been very large, reflecting the persistence of a highly hierarchical world economic system. Global inequality increased between 1820 and 1910, in the context of the rise of Western dominance and colonial empires, and then stabilized at a very high level between 1910 and 2020. Between 1820 and 1910, both between-countries and within-countries inequality were increasing. In contrast, these two components of global inequality have moved separately between 1910 and 2020: Within-countries inequality dropped in 1910–1980 (while between-countries inequality kept increasing) but rose in 1980–2020 (while between-countries inequality started to decline). As a consequence of these contradictory and compensating evolutions, early 21st century neo-colonial capitalism involves similar levels of inequality as early 20th century colonial capitalism, though it is based on a different set of rules and institutions. We also discuss how alternative rules such as fiscal revenue sharing could lead to a significant drop in global inequality. (JEL: N30, O10, O40)

This paper briefly presents the methodology of Distributional National Accounts (DINA), which distributes total national income and total wealth among all individual residents. With DINA, we can estimate inequality statistics and growth by income and wealth groups that are consistent with aggregate growth from National Accounts. This methodology has been recently applied to a number of countries, and the data produced are available from WID. world. The paper summarizes the initial empirical findings. We observe rising top income and wealth shares in nearly all countries in recent decades, but the magnitude of the increase varies substantially, thereby suggesting that different country‑specific institutions and policies matter. We combine countries’ statistics to estimate global inequality since 1980. Global inequality has increased since 1980 in spite of the catching up of large emerging countries like China and India. This has been driven by the income growth of top world earners., Cet article présente brièvement la méthodologie des comptes nationaux distributifs, qui ventile le revenu national total et le patrimoine total entre résidents. Ces comptes permettent d’estimer des statistiques d’inégalité et de croissance par catégorie de revenu et niveau de patrimoine cohérentes avec la croissance agrégée des comptes nationaux. Cette méthodologie a récemment été appliquée à plusieurs pays et les données produites sont disponibles dans WID. world, base de données sur les inégalités mondiales. L’article résume les premières conclusions empiriques. Au cours des dernières décennies, nous observons dans la quasi‑totalité des pays une hausse de la part du revenu et du patrimoine détenue par les plus riches, mais l’ampleur de cette hausse varie fortement, ce qui suggère que les institutions et politiques des différents pays jouent un rôle. Nous combinons les statistiques nationales pour estimer les inégalités mondiales depuis 1980. Malgré le rattrapage de grands pays émergents comme la Chine et l’Inde, les inégalités mondiales ont augmenté depuis 1980. Cette évolution s’explique par la croissance des revenus des personnes les mieux payées au niveau mondial., Alvaredo Facundo, Chancel Lucas, Piketty Thomas, Saez Emmanuel, Zucman Gabriel. Vers un système de comptes nationaux distributifs : méthodes et estimations des inégalités mondiales avec les données WID.world / Towards a System of Distributional National Accounts: Methods and Global Inequality Estimates from WID.world . In: Economie et Statistique / Economics and Statistics, n°517-519, 2020. Numéro spécial : Au-delà et autour du PIB : questions à la comptabilité nationale / Special Issue : Beyond and Around GDP: Questions to National Accounting pp. 43-63.

National audience; Un collectif de personnalités estime, dans une tribune au « Monde », que d’autres leviers doivent être étudiés pour atteindre l’objectif d’une neutralité carbone en 2050, en attendant que la taxe carbone soit remodelée.

This paper presents 10 basic facts regarding inequality in advanced economies.Income and wealth inequality was very high a century ago, dropped in the 20th century, and has been rising at different speeds across countries since the 1980s. The financial crisis of 2008 does not appear to have inverted this trend. At the global level, while between-country inequality mattered more than within-country inequality in the 1980s, it is the opposite today. The rise of inequality has not been counterbalanced by an increase social mobility. The reduction of gender pay gaps has tempered the rise of inequality in recent decades, but gender inequality remains particularly high among top income and wealth groups. Racial inequalities remain large as well. Evidence suggests that trade and technology alone cannot explain large inequality variations across rich countries. Shifts in tax and wage setting policies, as well as differences in educational and health systems matter a lot.

This paper estimates the evolution of income inequality in 38 European countries from 1980 to 2017 by combining surveys, tax data and national accounts. We develop a harmonized methodology, using machine learning, nonlinear survey calibration and extreme value theory, in order to produce homogeneous pre-tax and post-tax income inequality estimates, comparable across countries and consistent with official national income growth rates. Inequalities have in- creased in a majority of European countries, both at the top and at the bottom of the distribution, especially between 1980 and 2000. The European top 1% grew more than two times faster than the bottom 50% and captured 17% of regional income growth. Relative poverty in Europe went through ups and downs, increasing from 20% in 1980 to 22% in 2017. Inequalities yet remain lower and have increased much less in Europe than in the US, despite the persistence of strong income differences between European countries and the weaker progressivity of European-wide income redistribution.

Chapter I, entitled “Indian income inequality dynamics, 1922-2015: From British Raj to Billionaire Raj?” , discusses the methodological issues at stake when reconstructing historical income inequality series in a country as populated as India, but with very scarce data. The chapter shows that despite many important data limitations, one can combine tax data, surveys and national accounts in a systematic manner to reconstruct income inequality estimates robust to a wide range of alternative strategies. In the case of India, the results are striking as they reveal that income inequality is currently at its highest level since the creation of the Indian Income tax in 1922. The top 1% capture more than 22% of national income today, up from 6% in the mid-1980s, when the top 1% captured about 6% of total income. Chapter II, entitled “Building a global income distribution brick by brick” , builds on chapter I (and many other similar endeavors carried out by my colleagues at the WIL) to construct a global distribution of income based on a systematic combination of tax, survey data and national accounts. Our results are notable as some go against preconceived ideas on globalization and its impacts on economic inequality. In particular, we show that the global top 1% captured twice as much global income growth as the bottom 50% since 1980. We demonstrate that inequality increased, rather than decreased between world individuals since 1980, despite strong growth in the emerging world. In other words, rising inequality within countries was stronger than the effect of reduced inequality between countries since 1980. Looking into the future, the chapter also reveals that under “Business as Usual”, global inequality is likely to further rise (despite strong growth in emerging regions) contrary to what has been argued in academic and public debates on the matter. The Appendices to the chapter present the details of the method and reveal that our results are robust alternative strategies to account for missing data at the country level.How to move from global income inequality to global environmental inequality? A first step is to understand the role of income and non-income drivers of individual pollution levels within countries. This is the work that is discussed in Chapter III, entitled “Are younger generations higher carbon emitters than their elders?” , which focuses on the determinants of individual level CO2 emissions and focus on the role of income, technology and other factors, such as date of birth. We show that the French baby-boom generation emitted relatively more CO2 than their parents and their children, throughout their lifetime (about 20% more direct CO2 emissions). This is due to a combination of income, technological lock-in and cultural effects. Chapter IV, entitled “Carbon and inequality: From Kyoto to Paris” , builds on the results obtained in the previous chapters to construct a global distribution of carbon emissions. At the time of writing this chapter, global income inequality estimates presented in Chapter II were not available, so we had to rely on work done by other researchers to obtain global income series (Lakner and Milanovic, 2015). These were corrected with tax data and then used to reconstruct a global carbon emissions database. We show that the top 10% emitters account for about 45% of global emissions today and that twenty years ago, global inequality of carbon emissions was essentially a between-country inequality phenomena. Today, the situation is being reversed as within-country emissions inequality accounts for as much of global emissions inequality as the between-country dimension. On the basis of our results, we propose schemes to better share contributions to climate adaptation funds. The history of climate negotiations shows the extreme difficulty to implement any kinds of allocation rules to share a climate burden., Cette thèse porte sur la dynamique des inégalités de revenu et de pollution entre individus, à l’intérieur des pays et au niveau mondial. Plus précisément, l'objectif de ces travaux est de mieux mesurer et mieux comprendre les déterminants de la dynamique sur moyen ou long terme des inégalités de revenu à l'échelle d’un pays (chapitre I) ou au niveau mondial (chapitre II). Il s'agit également de mieux comprendre et mesurer les liens articulant les inégalités de revenu aux inégalités environnementales au niveau national (chapitre III) et mondial (chapitre IV). Enfin, la thèse discute de l’impact des indicateurs de mesure des inégalités sur l'action politique (chapitres V et VI).

International audience

This methodological note presents the methodology followed to construct homogeneous series of national accounts presented on WID.world (i.e. series of net national income, gross domestic product, net foreign income, consumption of fixed capital and population) covering (almost) all countries in the world, from at least 1950 to today.

The purpose of these DINA Guidelines is to present the concepts, data sources and methods used in the World Wealth and Income Database (WID.world, http://WID.world). These Guidelines are subject to revision and will be regularly updated on-line. Before we describe the organization of these Guidelines, it is useful to start with a brief history of WID.world.

"Grüne" Investitionen können in einem europäischen Wachstumspaket eine zentrale Rolle einnehmen, da sie kurzfristig spürbare Beschäftigungsimpulse und mittel- bis langfristig positive fiskalische Effekte auslösen können. Die Summe der zusätzlichen "grünen" Investitionen könnte die Größenordnung der Konjunkturpakete der Jahre 2008/2009 übersteigen. Obwohl viele Projekte für Energieeffizienz und erneuerbare Energien - insbesondere vor dem Hintergrund langfristig steigender Preise für fossile Brennstoffe - gesamtwirtschaftlich positiv zu bewerten sind, schreitet ihre Umsetzung nur zögerlich voran. Deswegen gilt es, für verlässliche regulatorische Rahmenbedingungen zu sorgen und Finanzierungshemmnisse zu beseitigen. In europäischer Zusammenarbeit können europäische und nationale Förderbanken mit Eigenkapital, Darlehen und Garantien gestärkt werden, so dass sie gezielt die Finanzierung von Projekten unterstützen können. Diskutiert werden gegenwärtig eine zusätzliche Kapitalisierung, zum Beispiel über das EU-Budget, oder staatliche Garantien von EU-Ländern mit guter Bonität. Die angestoßenen Projekte rentieren sich mittel- und langfristig über zukünftige Energieeinsparungen - und stehen somit nicht im Widerspruch zu den Zielen der Haushaltskonsolidierung. Europa setzt so Wachstumsimpulse, kommt weiter bei der Umsetzung seiner energie- und klimapolitischen Ziele und verringert seine Abhängigkeit von Energieimporten.

This study presents evolutions in the global distribution of CO2e emissions (CO2 and other Green House Gases) between world individuals from 1998 and 2013 and examines different strategies to finance a global climate adaptation fund based on efforts shared among high world emitters rather than high-income countries. To this end, we combine data on historical trends in per capita country-level CO2e emissions, consumption-based CO2e emissions data, within-country income inequality and a simple income-CO2e elasticity model. We show that global CO2e emissions inequalities between individuals decreased from Kyoto to Paris, due to the rise of top and mid income groups in developing countries and the relative stagnation of incomes and emissions of the majority of the population in industrialized economies. Income and CO2e emissions inequalities however increased within countries over the period. Global CO2e emissions remain highly concentrated today: top 10% emitters contribute to about 45% of global emissions, while bottom 50% emitters contribute to 13% of global emissions. Top 10% emitters live on all continents, with one third of them from emerging countries.

Rapport en libre accès: http://www.iddri.org/Publications/Collections/Syntheses/IB0615_LC%20TV_SDGs%20inequalities.pdf; Rapports; Cet Issue Brief évalue la capacité de transformation des objectifs de développement durable à travers l'étude de l’objectif n°10 de « réduire les inégalités au sein des pays et entre les pays », et plus particulièrement la cible n°10.1 de « faire en sorte, [d’ici à 2030], au moyen d’améliorations progressives, que les revenus des 40 % les plus pauvres de la population augmentent plus rapidement que le revenu moyen national, et ce de manière durable ». Quels pays ont jusqu'ici atteint cet objectif ? Et quels pays ne l'ont pas atteint ? Quelles leçons tirer de cette évaluation en termes d’engagement et d’appropriation de cet objectif particulier et des ODD en général par les pays, dans la perspective de faire des ODD un véritable agenda d’expérimentation et de transformation ?

Beyond GDP Indicators: Fo What Uses? The elaboration of new indicators of prosperity (NIP) arouses growing interest among many actors (NGOs, scholars, civil society, regional, national and international institutions). This paper studies the conditions of institutionalization of such indicators within the official decision-making spheres. To this end, six national and regional initiatives are considered in Australia, United Kingdom, Wales, Belgium, Wallonia and Germany. For each of them, we question the effectiveness of the uses of NIP as well as the roles - instrumental, political and symbolic - that such indicators are to play in decision making. Our study of the national and regional experiences leads us to formulate ten lessons that might inform and feed current debates on the institutionalization of the NIP, notably in France. We stress the importance of proposing complementary indicators to Gross Domestic Product rather than substitutes, the supportive role of executive and legislative authorities at the highest level, the strategic role of official institutes of statistics and the importance of submitting the elaboration and choice of NIP to a democratic debate., L'élaboration de nouveaux indicateurs de prospérité (NIP) fait l'objet d'un intérêt grandissant auprès de nombreux acteurs et instances (ONGs, académiques, société civile, institutions regionales, nationales et internationales). Cet article traite des conditions d'institutionnalisation, dans les sphères officielles, de tels indicateurs. Pour ce faire, six initiatives nationales et régionales sont étudiées en Australie, au Royaume-Uni, au Pays de Galles, en Belgique, en Wallonie et en Allemagne. Pour chacune d'entre elles, nous questionnons les usages effectifs de nouveaux indicateurs de prospérité ainsi que les rôles - instrumental, politique et symbolique - que ceux-ci sont amenés à jouer. L'analyse de ces experiences nationales et régionales nous conduit à formuler dix leçons pouvant instruire et alimenter les débats sur l'institutionnalisation des NIP, notamment en France. Parmi ces leçons apparaissent, entre autres, la pertinence de proposer des indicateurs complémentaires plutôt que substituables au Produit Intérieur Brut, le rôle de soutien que peuvent jouer les instances exécutives et législatives au plus haut niveau, le rôle stratégique des instituts nationaux de statistiques et l'importance de soumettre l'élaboration et le choix d'indicateurs à une débat démocratique.

International audience

GROWTH, A POLITICAL OBSESSION In political discourse, from both the right and the left, economic growth is held up as the solution to economic and social problems, in other words as a sine qua non of individual and collective prosperity. For the proponents of this discourse, high growth is not only desirable, but is also achievable, provided we give ourselves the necessary means. DECLINING GROWTH RATES OVER THE LAST 40 YEARS AND AN UNCERTAIN FUTURE The academic literature shows that beyond the current crisis, there is a good deal of uncertainty regarding the capacity of the different countries to restore high growth. Many factors, such as the expansion of the service sector, the pace and nature of technological innovation, and demographic change, all indicate that average growth within the European Union could be lower in the coming decades than over the last 30 years. ENVIRONMENTAL CONCERNS ARE ADDING TO THIS UNCERTAINTY Sometimes, the gravity of environmental issues is seen as an opportunity to spur on a new industrial revolution to deliver growth; at other times, it is viewed as a constraint that would further slow down the economy. The modelling exercise carried out in this report studies the linkages between climate and macroeconomics. It confirms the diagnosis of uncertainty surrounding the future of economic growth: under pessimistic but plausible assumptions for the coming decades (concerning energy resources, the cost of renewable energy, or lifestyle changes), the environment significantly reduces growth. PROSPERITY WITHOUT GROWTH, A POLITICAL AMBITION This study shows that very low growth rates in the future do not imply forsaking prosperity as it is conceived in European democracies. The linkages between employment, social protection, equity and wellbeing, on the one hand, and economic growth on the other, are less robust than is commonly thought. In terms of employment, some authors maintain that beyond the economic crises, it is not growth that generates jobs, but the opposite. In terms of self-reported wellbeing, or health outcomes, once a certain standard of living has been achieved, equality policies are a powerful force for progress, not growth. However, reducing economic inequalities and financing social protection are made more difficult in a context of low growth, which thus calls for a higher level of deliberation and arbitration. Ensuring prosperity in a post-growth world means more political action.