Income inequality in France, 1900–2014: Evidence from Distributional National Accounts (DINA)

Bertrand Garbinti, Jonathan Goupille-Lebret and Thomas Piketty

Journal of Public Economics, 2018, vol. 162, issue C, 63-77

Abstract: This paper presents “Distributional National Accounts” (DINA) for France. That is, we combine national accounts, tax and survey data in a comprehensive and consistent manner to build homogenous annual series on the distribution of national income by percentiles over the 1900–2014 period, with detailed breakdown by age, gender and income categories over the 1970–2014 period. Our DINA-based estimates allow for a much richer analysis of the long-run pattern found in previous tax-based series, i.e. a long-run decline in income inequality, largely due to a sharp drop in the concentration of wealth and capital income following the 1914–1945 capital shocks. First, our new series deliver higher inequality levels than the usual tax-based series for the recent decades, because the latter miss a rising part of capital income. Growth incidence curves look dramatically different for the 1950–1983 and 1983–2014 sub-periods. We also show that gender inequality in labor income declined in recent decades, albeit fairly slowly among top labor incomes. E.g. female share among top 0.1% earners was only 12% in 2012 (vs. 7% in 1994 and 5% in 1970). Finally, we find that distributional changes can have large impact on comparisons of well-being across countries. E.g. average pretax income among bottom 50% adults is 20% larger in France than in the U.S., in spite of the fact that aggregate per adult national income is 30% smaller in France.

Keywords: Income distribution; Capital accumulation; Wage distribution; Gender gap (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (170)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0047272718300124
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
Working Paper: Income Inequality in France, 1900-2014: Evidence from Distributional National Accounts (DINA) (2018)
Working Paper: Income Inequality in France, 1900-2014: Evidence from Distributional National Accounts (DINA) (2018)
Working Paper: Income inequality in France, 1900–2014: Evidence from Distributional National Accounts (DINA) (2018)
Working Paper: Income inequality in France, 1900–2014: Evidence from Distributional National Accounts (DINA) (2018)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:pubeco:v:162:y:2018:i:c:p:63-77

DOI: 10.1016/j.jpubeco.2018.01.012

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Public Economics is currently edited by R. Boadway and J. Poterba

More articles in Journal of Public Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().