Top Incomes in the U.S. and Abroad
May 11, 2008A key aspect of the rise in income inequality in the United States since the 1970s is the soaring incomes of the top 1%. Is this development unique to the U.S.?
Tony Atkinson, Andrew Leigh, Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and others have used tax records to estimate the top 1%’s share of total income in a number of countries. Leigh has made a few adjustments to enhance comparability across the countries and posted the data on his website. He has a nice paper on the issue, which includes a version of the two charts shown below. (For more data and analysis see here, here, here, here, and here.) The data are for pretax incomes excluding capital gains.
It turns out that other English-speaking countries have experienced a similar trend:
Is this, then, simply the norm? No. In other affluent nations, the top 1%’s income share has increased only slightly or not at all during this period:
What accounts for these differing developments? We don’t know. Hypotheses abound, including differences in market competition, norms, labor power, government partisanship, tax systems, corporate governance practices, and demand for entertainment, athletic, and English-speaking executive talent. Because the data are relatively new, however, there has been limited systematic analysis as of yet.
