This paper presents new findings on global inequality dynamics from the World Wealth and Income Database (WID.world), with particular emphasis on the contrast between the trends observed in the United States, China, France, and the United Kingdom. We observe rising top income and wealth shares in nearly all countries in recent decades. But the magnitude of the increase varies substantially, thereby suggesting that different country-specific policies and institutions matter considerably. Long-run wealth inequality dynamics appear to be highly unstable. We stress the need for more democratic transparency on income and wealth dynamics and better access to administrative and financial data.

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We combine household surveys and national accounts, as well as recently released tax data to track the dynamics of Indian income inequality from 1922 to 2015. According to our benchmark estimates, the top 1 percent of earners captured less than 21 percent of total income in the late 1930s, before dropping to 6 percent in the early 1980s and rising to 22 percent in the recent period. Our results appear to be robust to a range of alternative assumptions seeking to address numerous data limitations. These findings suggest that much more can be done to promote inclusive growth in India. We also stress the need for more transparency on income and wealth statistics, which is key to allow an informed democratic debate on inequality.JEL Codes: D31, N35, O15

We present new evidence on global inequality and growth since 1980 using the World and Wealth Income Database. We plot the curve of cumulated growth from 1980 to 2016 by percentile of the global distribution of income per adult. This curve has an elephant shape due to high growth rates at the median (fast growth in China and India), modest growth rates above the median, and explosive growth rates at the top. We project the evolution of global inequality between now and 2050 combining projected macro growth rates and within country inequality evolution based on past trends.

limate change and economic inequalities are among the most pressing challenges of our times, and they are interrelated: failure to contain climate change is likely to exacerbate inequalities within and between countries 1-4 and economic inequalities within countries tend to slow the implementation of climate policies 5,6 . To properly understand the relationship between economic inequality and climate change, sound and timely data about the distribution of greenhouse gases (GHG) emissions between individuals and across the globe are needed. Such information is currently missing. As a matter of fact, researchers, policymakers and civil society struggle to establish even basic facts about which groups of the population contribute to emissions growth, or mitigation. This jeopardizes any efforts towards sustainable lifestyles.This paper addresses these issues by harnessing recent conceptual and empirical progress in the measurement of income, wealth and GHG emissions. Compared with previous work on global carbon inequality 7-10 , this paper presents three major developments in terms of data, methods and scope.First, the paper uses novel income and wealth inequality data from the World Inequality Database 11 to track inequality from the bottom to the top of the distribution. These economic inequality data are combined with GHG footprints from input-output models thanks to a newly assembled set of country-level information on the link between individual emissions, consumption and income in more than 100 countries. The methodology therefore makes it possible to track individual GHG emission levels with more precision than previous longitudinal carbon inequality estimates 9 . Second, the method developed allows explicitly distinguishing between emissions from private consumption and investments, making it possible to better understand the drivers of emissions among wealthy groups. Third, the paper focuses on the distribution of emissions over the 1990-2019 period, that is, from the first Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report to the eve of the Covid-19 pandemic. The three decades saw critical shifts in the distribution of world economic growth 12 , which have not been systematically studied from the point of view of GHG emissions inequality.There are two broad approaches to the measurement of global carbon inequality. 'Bottom-up' approaches use household-level microdata to produce macroestimates. This is the approach taken by

This article combines all available data to produce pretax and post-tax income inequality series in 26 European countries from 1980 to 2017. Our estimates are consistent with macroeconomic growth and comparable with US distributional national accounts. Inequality grew in nearly all European countries, but much less than in the US. Contrary to a widespread view, we demonstrate that Europe’s lower inequality levels cannot be explained by more equalizing tax and transfer systems. After accounting for indirect taxes and in-kind transfers, the US redistributes a greater share of national income to low-income groups than any European country. “Predistribution,” not “redistribution,” explains why Europe is less unequal than the United States. (JEL D31, E01, H23, H24, H50, I38)

International audienceThis paper presents new findings on global inequality dynamics from the World Wealth and Income Database (WID.world), with particular emphasis on the contrast between the trends observed in the United States, China, France, and the United Kingdom. We observe rising top income and wealth shares in nearly all countries in recent decades. But the magnitude of the increase varies substantially, thereby suggesting that different country-specific policies and institutions matter considerably. Long-run wealth inequality dynamics appear to be highly unstable. We stress the need for more democratic transparency on income and wealth dynamics and better access to administrative and financial data

In this paper, we mobilize newly available historical series from the World Inequality Database to construct world income distribution estimates from 1820 to 2020. We find that the level of global income inequality has always been very large, reflecting the persistence of a highly hierarchical world economic system. Global inequality increased between 1820 and 1910, in the context of the rise of Western dominance and colonial empires, and then stabilized at a very high level between 1910 and 2020. Between 1820 and 1910, both between-countries and within-countries inequality Q5 were increasing. In contrast, these two components of global inequality have moved separately between 1910 and 2020: Within-countries inequality dropped in 1910-1980 (while between-countries inequality kept increasing) but rose in 1980-2020 (while between-countries inequality started to decline). As a consequence of these contradictory and compensating evolutions, early 21st century neo-colonial capitalism involves similar levels of inequality as early 20th century colonial capitalism, though it is based on a different set of rules and institutions. We also discuss how alternative rules such as fiscal revenue sharing could lead to a significant drop in global inequality.