"Top Incomes in the Long Run of History" with Tony Atkinson and

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40Journal of Economic Literature, Vol. XLIX (March 2011)the United Kingdom (12.5 percent in 1998),or the United States (15.3 percent in 1998).To sum up, the different pieces of evidenceindicate that tax evasion and tax avoidanceneed to be taken seriously and can quantitativelyaffect the conclusions drawn. Theyneed to be borne in mind when consideringthe results but they are not so large as tomean that the tax data should be rejected outof hand. Our view is that legally tax-exemptcapital income poses more serious problemsthan tax evasion and tax avoidance per se.3.2.4 Income MobilityA classical objection to inequality measuresbased on annual cross sectional incomeis that individuals move up or down the distributionof income over time. If individualscan use credit markets to smooth fluctuationsin income, then annual income mightnot be a good measure of economic welfare.Therefore, analyzing income mobility is valuablealthough it requires access to panel data.Saez and Veall (2005) and Kopcuzk, Saez, andSong (2010) have analyzed jointly inequalityand mobility for at the top of the individualwage earnings distributions in Canada andthe United States. They found that mobility,measured as the probability to drop out of thetop percentile from one year to the next, hasbeen remarkably stable over the last decadeseven though top wage earnings shares surgedin both countries. As a result, increasedmobility did not mitigate increases in annualtop earnings shares. It would be valuable toextend such mobility analyzes at the top ofthe distribution to other countries and tototal income (instead of just wage earnings).4. A Summary of the Main FindingsWe depict in the annual top 1 percentshare of total gross income series for twentytwoindividual countries grouped in figures8–11 as follows: figure 8—Western Englishspeaking countries (United States, Canada,United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, NewZealand); figure 9—Continental CentralEuropean countries (France, Germany,Netherlands, Switzerland) and Japan; figure10—Nordic European countries (Norway,Sweden, Finland) and Southern Europeancountries (Portugal, Spain, Italy); and figure11—Developing countries (China,India, Singapore, Indonesia, Argentina). Aswe shall see, the grouping is made not onlyon cultural or geographical proximity butalso on proximity of the historical evolutionof top income shares. In all cases, we haveused series excluding realized capital gains(as only a subset of countries present seriesincluding capital gains, and in those cases,series excluding capital gains have also beenproduced). We have used the same y-axisscale in all four figures to facilitate comparisonsacross figures. Western Englishspeaking countries in figure 8 display a clearU-shape over the century. Continental centralEuropean countries and Japan in figure 9display an L-shape over the century. Nordicand Southern European countries display apattern in between a U and a L shape in figure10 as the drop in the early part of theperiod is much more pronounced than therebound in the late part of period. Finally,developing countries in figure 11 also displaya U/L shape pattern although there is substantialheterogeneity in this group.Let us summarize first the evidence in themiddle of the twentieth century. The firstcolumns in table 6 show the position in 1949(1950). 29 We take this year as one for whichwe have estimates for all except four of thetwenty-two countries, and as one when mostcountries had begun to return to normalityafter the Second World War (for Germanyand the Netherlands we take 1950).29 In the case of New Zealand, we have used the estimatesof Atkinson and Leigh (2008: table 1) that adjust forthe change in the tax unit in 1953. For Indonesia we havetaken the 1939 estimate and for Ireland that for 1943.
Atkinson, Piketty, and Saez: Top Incomes in the Long Run of History413025United StatesCanadaIrelandUnited KingdomAustraliaNew Zealand2015105019101915192019251930193519401945195019551960196519701975198019851990199520002005Top percentile share (in percent)Figure 8. Top 1 Percent Share: English Speaking Countries (U-shaped), 1910–2005Source: Atkinson and Piketty (2007, 2010).Moreover, it was before the 1950–51 commodityprice boom that affected top sharesin Australia, New Zealand, and Singapore.If we start with the top 1 percent—thegroup on which attention is commonlyfocused and which is depicted on figures8–11—then we can see from table 6 that theshares of total gross income are strikinglysimilar when we take account of the possiblemargins of error. There are eighteen countriesfor which we have estimates. If we take10 percent as the central value (the medianis in fact around 10.8), then twelve of theeighteen lie within the range 8 to 12 percent(i.e., with an error margin of ± 20 percent).In countries as diverse as India, Norway,France, New Zealand, and the United States,the top 1 percent had on average betweeneight to twelve times average income. Threecountries were only just below 8 percent:Japan, Finland, and Sweden. The countriesabove the range were Ireland, Argentina,and (colonial) Indonesia. The top 1 percentis of course just one point on the distribution.If we look at the top 0.1 percent, shownin table 6 for eighteen countries (Portugalreplacing Finland), then we find that againtwelve lie within a (± 20 percent) rangearound 3.25 percent from 2.6 to 3.9 percent.Leaving out the three outliers at each end,the top 0.1 percent had between twenty-sixand thirty-nine times the average income.We also report in table 6 the inversePareto–Lorenz coefficients β associated tothe upper tail of the observed distributionin the various countries in 1949 and 2005.
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