Coming back to blogging on inequality

 I cannot believe it has been more than two years since the last time I wrote a piece here.  Time goes very fast!  My (late) New Year's resolution is to write more often on inequality, providing examples of excessive wealth, reporting on new papers and books and offering some statistical insights.  Today I start with a graph that reflects the huge diversity in terms of inequality in today's world.  Using data from the World Inequality Database (which is based on a combination of tax data, household surveys and national account statistics), I compare the income share of the wealthiest 1% and that of the bottom 50%.

The share of the bottom 50% varies from more than 24% in countries like Slovenia or Norway to only 6% in Peru or Mexico.  Can you imagine?  An income share of just 6% for half of the country helps to explain high levels of poverty and social discontent.  As a mirror image, we have that the wealthiest 1% receives more than a quarter of total income in some countries.

This graph has so many implications for research and policy: it signals that in many countries income inequality is really about income concentration at the top; it questions the use of GDP per capita as a measure of how the "average citizen" lives and it highlights the diversity of capitalisms at least in terms of distribution.

Even more than all of this, the graph signals one it is important to write even more about inequality... as I will try to do from now on!