Inequality and growth in the very long run: Inferring inequality from data on social groups

Arbeitspapier

Income distribution data from before the Industrial Revolution usually comes in the shape of social tables: inventories of a range of social groups and their mean incomes. These are frequently reported without adjusting for within-group income dispersion, leading to a systematic downward bias in the reporting of pre-industrial inequality. This paper suggests a correction method, and applies it to an existing collection of twenty-five social tables, from Rome in AD 1 to India in 1947. The corrections, using a variety of assumptions on within-group dispersion, lead to substantial increases in the Gini coeffcients. Combining the inequality levels with data on GDP, a robust positive relationship between income inequality and economic growth is confirmed. This supports earlier proposals, based on fewer data points, of a 'super Kuznets curve' of increasing inequality over the entire pre-industrial period.

Object Details

• Language: Englisch

References and Relationships

• Bibliographic citation: Series: Memorandum ; No. 2011,11

Classification and Topics

• Classification: Wirtschaft ; Personal Income, Wealth, and Their Distributions ; Economic History: Labor and Consumers, Demography, Education, Health, Welfare, Income, Wealth, Religion, and Philanthropy: General, International, or Comparative ; Macroeconomic Analyses of Economic Development ; Miscellaneous Mathematical Tools
• Subject: Pre-industrial inequality ; social tables ; Kuznets curve ; history

Contributors, Places and Time

• Event: Geistige Schöpfung
• (who): Modalsli, Jørgen Heibø
• Event: Veröffentlichung
• (who): University of Oslo, Department of Economics
• (where): Oslo
• (when): 2011

Further information

• Handle: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/47275
• Last update: 10.03.2025, 11:41 AM CET