This paper presents a historical database on educational attainment in 74 countries for the period 1870-2010, using perpetual inventory methods before 1960 and then the Cohen and Soto (2007) database. The correlation between the two sets of average years of schooling in 1960 is equal to 0.96. We...

This paper examines one aspect of the historical income distribution in Tanzania – the shares of top incomes – using information published as a result of the administration of the individual income tax. Although tax data were employed in earlier studies of developing countries, they have...

There has been a large rise in the UK ratio of personal wealth to national income. Personal wealth has grown since the 1970s about twice as fast in real terms as national income. Has this rise in the wealth-income ratio led to a corresponding increase in the wealth being passed on from one...

This paper is intended as a contribution to the debate about the relationship between economic growth and national objectives, and the way in which achievement of the latter can be assessed by alternative indicators of economic and social performance. Faster growth of GDP is an instrumental...