IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/een/camaaa/2019-36.html

Dimensions of Inequality in Japan: Distributions of Earnings, Income and Wealth between 1984 and 2014

Author

Listed:
  • Sagiri Kitao
  • Tomoaki Yamada

Abstract

Inequality has become a central policy issue across the world. We study trends of inequality in earnings, income and wealth across households in Japan, using the National Survey of Family Income and Expenditure (NSFIE) from 1984 to 2014. We focus on the transition of inequality unconditionally and conditionally across various dimensions of household heterogeneity such as age, cohort, employment and marital status of household heads, sources of income, family size, etc. Inequality in earnings, income and wealth all increased during the last three decades. Changes in earnings and income inequality were mostly driven by demographic shift in the population towards the elderly, who tend to have higher inequality. Wealth inequality rose not only in the aggregate but also among the young, and this is due to a major increase in the fraction of households who own zero or very low wealth across all age groups. Critical factors in understanding inequality trends in Japan that we identified are aging demographics, changes in typical household structure, and macroeconomic trends of the past decades including the financial bubble period and a decades-long slow-down thereafter.

Suggested Citation

  • Sagiri Kitao & Tomoaki Yamada, 2019. "Dimensions of Inequality in Japan: Distributions of Earnings, Income and Wealth between 1984 and 2014," CAMA Working Papers 2019-36, Centre for Applied Macroeconomic Analysis, Crawford School of Public Policy, The Australian National University.
    • Handle: RePEc:een:camaaa:2019-36
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://crawford.anu.edu.au/sites/default/files/2025-01/36_2019_kitao_yamada.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Jacek Rothert & Andy Glover & Ayse Kabukcuoglu Dur, 2023. "Winners and losers from reducing global imbalances," GRAPE Working Papers 80, GRAPE Group for Research in Applied Economics.
    2. Zhang, Bingqi & Nozawa, Wataru & Managi, Shunsuke, 2021. "Spatial inequality of inclusive wealth in China and Japan," Economic Analysis and Policy, Elsevier, vol. 71(C), pages 164-179.
    3. R. Anton Braun & Daisuke Ikeda, 2020. "Why Cash Transfers Are Good Policy in the COVID-19 Pandemic," Policy Hub, Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, vol. 2020(4), pages 1-13, May.
    4. Kitao, Sagiri & Mikoshiba, Minamo, 2020. "Females, the elderly, and also males: Demographic aging and macroeconomy in Japan," Journal of the Japanese and International Economies, Elsevier, vol. 56(C).
    5. repec:fip:a00001:87974 is not listed on IDEAS
    6. Sagiri Kitao & Tomoaki Yamada, 2025. "The time trend and life-cycle profiles of consumption," Review of Economics of the Household, Springer, vol. 23(1), pages 71-111, March.
    7. Aurelien Eyquem & Masahige Hamano, 2022. "Aging, Fertility and Macroeconomic Dynamics," Working Papers 2121, Waseda University, Faculty of Political Science and Economics.
    8. Ono, Taiki, 2024. "Bequests and wealth inequality in Japan," Journal of the Japanese and International Economies, Elsevier, vol. 72(C).
    9. Taiyo Fukai & Hidehiko Ichimura & Sagiri Kitao & Minamo Mikoshiba, 2025. "Medical expenditures over the life-cycle: persistent risks and insurance," The Japanese Economic Review, Springer, vol. 76(2), pages 285-336, April.
    10. Jake J. Xia, 2024. "Emergence of Power-Law and Other Wealth Distributions in Crowd of Heterogeneous Agents," Papers 2412.12393, arXiv.org.
    11. Reona Hagiwara, 2022. "Welfare Effects of Health Insurance Reform: The Role of Elastic Medical Demand," IMES Discussion Paper Series 22-E-05, Institute for Monetary and Economic Studies, Bank of Japan.
    12. Hirokuni Iiboshi & Daisuke Ozaki, 2022. "The Impact of the Social Security Reforms on Welfare: Who benefits and Who loses across Generations, Gender, and Employment Type?," Papers 2205.08042, arXiv.org, revised Oct 2022.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;

    JEL classification:

    • D31 - Microeconomics - - Distribution - - - Personal Income and Wealth Distribution
    • D15 - Microeconomics - - Household Behavior - - - Intertemporal Household Choice; Life Cycle Models and Saving
    • E21 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Consumption, Saving, Production, Employment, and Investment - - - Consumption; Saving; Wealth

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    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:een:camaaa:2019-36. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    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.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using 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.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Cama Admin (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/asanuau.html .

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

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.