Towards a System of Distributional National Accounts: Methods and Global Inequality Estimates from WID.world

Facundo Alvaredo (), Lucas Chancel, Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman

Economie et Statistique / Economics and Statistics, 2020, issue 517-518-519, 41-59

Abstract: [eng] This paper briefly presents the methodology of Distributional National Accounts (DINA), which distributes total national income and total wealth among all individual residents. With DINA, we can estimate inequality statistics and growth by income and wealth groups that are consistent with aggregate growth from National Accounts. This methodology has been recently applied to a number of countries, and the data produced are available from WID.world. The paper summarizes the initial empirical findings. 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 institutions and policies matter. We combine countries’ statistics to estimate global inequality since 1980. Global inequality has increased since 1980 in spite of the catching up of large emerging countries like China and India. This has been driven by the income growth of top world earners.

JEL-codes: D31 D33 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

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Related works:
Working Paper: Towards a System of Distributional National Accounts: Methods and Global Inequality Estimates from WID.world (2020)
Working Paper: Towards a System of Distributional National Accounts: Methods and Global Inequality Estimates from WID.world (2020)
Working Paper: Towards a System of Distributional National Accounts: Methods and Global Inequality Estimates from WID.world (2020)
Working Paper: Towards a System of Distributional National Accounts: Methods and Global Inequality Estimates from WID.world (2020)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nse:ecosta:ecostat_2020_517t_4

DOI: 10.24187/ecostat.2020.517t.2018

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