Relative income distribution in six European countries: market and disposable income

Ilaria Petrarca and Roberto Ricciuti

No 629, LIS Working papers from LIS Cross-National Data Center in Luxembourg

Abstract: The relationship between income inequality and polarization is an empirical fact: a change in equality might occur together with a change in polarization. At the same time, polarization might emerge while inequality remains constant. The outcome of this process entails relevant information about the evolution of the income distribution. We exploit the LIS micro-data to perform a relative distribution analysis for six European countries. Our aim is describing how both the market and the disposable income distributions evolved over time. The results indicate that polarization increased in all the considered countries, being the largest in the United Kingdom and the smallest in Italy. At the beginning of the period the relative polarization of disposable income is lower than the one for market income. In time, however, this pattern is reversed. This evidence does not unambiguously suggest an increasing effectiveness of the equalizing role of the welfare state. Nonetheless, in all the countries downgrading prevails over upgrading: the relevance of the middle-class getting poorer is larger than the one of the middle-class getting richer.

Keywords: Income distribution; polarization; inequality; relative distribution methods (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C14 D31 D63 I32 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 112 pages
Date: 2015-01
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Published in Working Paper Series Department of Economics University of Verona, no. 2, January 2015. http://dse.univr.it/home/workingpapers/wp2015n2.pdf

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.lisdatacenter.org/wps/liswps/629.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Relative income distribution in six European countries: market and disposable income (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:lis:liswps:629

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in LIS Working papers from LIS Cross-National Data Center in Luxembourg Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Piotr Paradowski ().