Rising Income Inequality and Living Standards in OECD Countries: How Does the Middle Fare?

Brian Nolan, Lane Kenworthy, Stefan Thewissen, Max Roser and Tim Smeeding

INET Oxford Working Papers from Institute for New Economic Thinking at the Oxford Martin School, University of Oxford

Abstract: This paper uses data from the key comparative sources available for the rich countries to examine how both real median incomes and income inequality have evolved from around 1980 through the Great Recession. There are striking differences across OECD countries in average real median income growth. Some increase in overall inequality has been common, but with wide variation in extent and timing. Top (pretax) income shares have generally been rising, but not always consistently with overall inequality from household surveys. A significant negative association between changes in Gini and median income is found across countries over time, and a significant negative relationship with changes in top shares only when controlling for economic growth. Economic growth and inequality trends together leave much of the variation in median incomes unaccounted for, so direct measures of how these incomes are evolving need to be central to monitoring progress towards inclusive growth.

JEL-codes: D31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 31 pages
Date: 2015-12
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.inet.ox.ac.uk/files/WP1.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Rising Income Inequality and Living Standards in OECD Countries: How Does the Middle Fare? (2018)
Working Paper: Rising Income Inequality and Living Standards in OECD Countries: How Does the Middle Fare? (2015)
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:amz:wpaper:2015-01

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in INET Oxford Working Papers from Institute for New Economic Thinking at the Oxford Martin School, University of Oxford Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by INET Oxford admin team ().