IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/bla/jorssa/v168y2005i2p325-343.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Top incomes in the UK over the 20th century

Author

Listed:
  • A. B. Atkinson

Abstract

Summary. Recent changes in the distribution of income need to be placed in historical context. The paper provides new evidence about the evolution of top incomes in the UK over the 20th century. Making use of published tabulations of the income tax statistics, and of microdata for recent years, we construct estimates of the shares of top income groups, giving for the first time an annual time series for gross incomes that spans more than 90 years. The paper pays particular attention to the problems of data construction and of the interpretation of tax‐based evidence. The resulting statistics have evident limitations but throw light on periods, such as that between the First and Second World Wars, for which there is little other empirical material. The results bring out clearly how the major equalization of the first three‐quarters of the century in the UK has been reversed, taking the shares of the top income groups back to levels of inequality found 50 years ago. A similar U‐shaped pattern is found for the USA, but the post‐war experience of France is different from that in the UK.

Suggested Citation

  • A. B. Atkinson, 2005. "Top incomes in the UK over the 20th century," Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series A, Royal Statistical Society, vol. 168(2), pages 325-343, March.
    • Handle: RePEc:bla:jorssa:v:168:y:2005:i:2:p:325-343
    DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-985X.2005.00351.x
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-985X.2005.00351.x
    Download Restriction: no

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Simon Kuznets & Elizabeth Jenks, 1953. "Shares of Upper Income Groups in Savings," NBER Chapters, in: Shares of Upper Income Groups in Income and Savings (1953), pages 171-218, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    2. Chipman, John S., 1974. "The welfare ranking of Pareto distributions," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 9(3), pages 275-282, November.
    3. Simon Kuznets & Elizabeth Jenks, 1953. "Shares of Upper Income Groups in Income and Savings (1953)," NBER Books, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc, number kuzn53-1, June.
    4. Thomas Piketty & Emmanuel Saez, 2003. "Income Inequality in the United States, 1913–1998," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Oxford University Press, vol. 118(1), pages 1-41.
    5. A. B. Atkinson, 2004. "Income Tax and Top Incomes over the Twentieth Century," Hacienda Pública Española, IEF, vol. 168(1), pages 123-141, march.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:bla:jorssa:v:168:y:2005:i:2:p:325-343. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: (Wiley Content Delivery). General contact details of provider: http://edirc.repec.org/data/rssssea.html .

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service hosted by the Research Division of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis . RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.