Journal Article

A different perspective on the evolution of UK income inequality

Authors

Publication date

04 Mar 2019

Summary

This paper scrutinizes the conventional wisdom about trends in UK income inequality and also places contemporary inequality in a much longer historical perspective. We combine household survey and income tax data to provide better coverage of all income ranges from the bottom to the very top (and make our estimates available to other researchers). We make a case for studying distributions of income between tax units (i.e. not assuming the full income sharing that goes with the use of the household as the unit of analysis) for reasons of principle as well as data harmonization. We present evidence that income inequality in the UK is as least as high today as it was just before the start of World War 2.

Published in

Review of Income and Wealth

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1111/roiw.12412

Subjects

Households, Economics, and Income Dynamics

Notes

Open Access; Online Early; This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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