The aim of this country report for Ireland is to present and examine key patterns and trends in the inequality ‘drivers’ on which the project is concentrating, highlight their potential impacts in the social, political and cultural spheres and the available evidence in that regard, and point...

The development of the Finnish income inequality from the midU1960s to 2010 can be distinguished into five periods. First, the era of welfare state expansion in the 1960s and the 1970s meant decreasing trend in income inequality for all income concepts (equivalised household factor income, gross...

Against the backdrop of growing income inequalities across industrialized countries, Belgium is a remarkable outlier. While breaks in series and different data sources call for a reasonable degree of caution, there is no indication that disposable household income inequalities among the Belgian...

In contrast with many other European and OECD countries, Spain’s income inequality has decreased over the last 30 years. Nevertheless, Spain is still among the most unequal countries in the EU15, as it started from a fairly disadvantaged situation. Spain’s inequality indices are typically...

This paper gives an account of economic inequality in Denmark from the 1980s until 2010. It is based on register data for the whole population and enables us to map the entire Danish income distribution year by year for all sorts of sub groups. The Danish income distribution has for very long...

his report deals with various inequalities and their correlates, effects and causes in the Czech Republic and Slovakia over the recent decades, focusing mainly on the 1990s and 2000s. Its main objective is to provide a comprehensive account of changing inequalities in income, wealth and...

The aim of this country report for Greece is to present and examine key patterns and trends in the inequality ‘drivers’, highlight their potential impacts in the social, political and cultural spheres and the available evidence in that regard, and point to the role that various interest...

Over the 1980s inequality in the UK increased dramatically. Since the 1990s there have been periods of falling inequality and periods of rising inequality but nothing that matches the change in inequality that occurred in the 1980s. Not only did the increase in inequality in the 1980s lead to a...

In brief, we find that inequality is high and rising in the United States, but the great majority of the increase was captured by the top end of the distribution since the mid-1990s—the top 1 percent in any given year and the top 5 to 10 percent overall—over the past 40 years. Overall...

Most inequality measures and income concepts show a moderate, but steady growth in inequality in Poland since early 1990s. Inequality of market income is much higher than inequality in terms of other income concepts. In general, absolute poverty declined from 13.2% in 1993 to 3.9% in 2010. The...