IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/hal/wilwps/halshs-03693208.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Wealth Inequality in Interwar Poland

Author

Listed:
  • Marcin Wroński

    (SGH Warsaw School of Economics)

Abstract

In 1923 Poland introduced an extraordinary wealth tax. We use the internal statistics of the Ministry of the Treasury to estimate wealth inequality in interwar Poland. This data source has not been previously used by researchers. There are no estimates of wealth inequality in interwar Poland available in the literature. According to our estimates, the top 0.01% of the wealth distribution controlled 16.4% of total private wealth. The wealth share of the top 1% stood at 42.5%. The top decile owned 67.3% of total private wealth. Wealth inequality varied strongly across regions. A comparison of wealth inequality in Poland with wealth inequality in other European countries in the interwar period yields a diverse picture. The wealth share of the top 0.01% was the highest in Europe, the wealth share of the top 1% was in the middle of the European ranking, the wealth share of the top 10% was almost the lowest in Europe. The small elite of super-rich (0.01%) was very wealthy in comparison to the European peers, but the wealth share of the rest of the top decile was relatively low. The unequal development of former partitions may partially explain high very top wealth shares.

Suggested Citation

  • Marcin Wroński, 2022. "Wealth Inequality in Interwar Poland," World Inequality Lab Working Papers halshs-03693208, HAL.
    • Handle: RePEc:hal:wilwps:halshs-03693208
    Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-03693208
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-03693208/document
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    More about this item

    Keywords

    wealth distribution; inequality; Poland; interwar;
    All these keywords.

    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:hal:wilwps:halshs-03693208. 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: Caroline Bauer (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/ .

    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.