Top Indian Incomes, 1956-2000

Thomas Piketty and Abhijit Banerjee

No 4137, CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers

Abstract: This Paper presents data on the evolution of top incomes and wages from 1956 to 2000 in India using individual tax returns data. Our data shows that the shares of the top 0.01%, the top 0.1% and the top 1% in total income shrank very substantially until the early-to-mid 1980s, but then went back up again, so that today these shares are only slightly below what they were in 1956. We argue that this U-shaped pattern is broadly consistent with the evolution of economic policy in India - the period from 1956 to the early-to-mid 1980s was also the period of ?socialist? policies in India, while the subsequent period, starting with the rise of Rajiv Gandhi, saw a gradual shift towards more pro-business policies. Although the initial share of this group was small, the fact that the rich were getting richer had a non-trivial impact on the overall income distribution. In particular, its impact is not large enough to fully explain the gap between average consumption growth in survey-based NSS data and the National accounts-based NAS data, but is sufficiently large to explain a non-negligible part of it (between 20% and 40%).

Keywords: Income; distribution (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D63 N34 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2002-12
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP4137 (application/pdf)
CEPR Discussion Papers are free to download for our researchers, subscribers and members. If you fall into one of these categories but have trouble downloading our papers, please contact us at subscribers@cepr.org

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:4137

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP4137

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers Centre for Economic Policy Research, 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().