The Evolution of Top Incomes in an Egalitarian Society: Sweden, 1903–2004

Jesper Roine () and Daniel Waldenström

No 625, SSE/EFI Working Paper Series in Economics and Finance from Stockholm School of Economics

Abstract: This study presents new homogenous series of top income shares in Sweden over the period 1903 to 2004. We find that, starting from higher levels of inequality than in other Western countries, the income share of the Swedish top decile drops sharply over the first eighty years of the century. The fall is almost entirely due to a dramatic drop in the top percentile, while the lower half of the top decile experiences virtually no change over this period. Most of the decrease takes place before the expansion of the welfare state, in fact, by 1950 Swedish top income shares were already lower than in other countries. In the past decades the Swedish top income shares developed very differently depending on whether capital gains are included or not. Including them, Sweden’s experience resembles that in the U.S. and the U.K. with sharp increases in top incomes, whereas excluding them Sweden looks more like the Continental European countries where top income shares have remained relatively constant. A possible interpretation of our results is that Sweden over the past 20 years has become a country where it is more important make the right investments than to have a high salary to become rich.

Keywords: Income inequality; Income distribution; Wealth distribution; Top incomes; Welfare State; Sweden; Taxation; Capital gains (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D31 H20 J30 N30 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 36 pages
Date: 2006-04-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eec and nep-his
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
http://swopec.hhs.se/hastef/papers/hastef0625.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: The evolution of top incomes in an egalitarian society: Sweden, 1903-2004 (2008)
Working Paper: The Evolution of Top Incomes in an Egalitarian Society; Sweden, 1903–2004 (2006)
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:hhs:hastef:0625

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in SSE/EFI Working Paper Series in Economics and Finance from Stockholm School of Economics The Economic Research Institute, Stockholm School of Economics, P.O. Box 6501, 113 83 Stockholm, Sweden. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Helena Lundin ().