Commentary

摘要

While the 1950s and 1960s were a period of increased social inclusion and convergence in standards of living for countries of the Global North, inequality has increased and social mobility declined dramatically since the early 1980s (Atkinson and Piketty, 2007; OECD, 2008). And while this trend is particularly pronounced in the US and the UK, it is now observable in several other countries where the shift in incomes from the bottom and middle of the distribution toward the top has been sustained since the 1980s (see figure 1). As Piketty and Saez (2003) demonstrate in their research on US trends, the pretax income share of the top 1% has returned to levels not observed since predepression times. A more recent analysis by Mishel and Bivens (2011) shows that, between 1979 and 2007, inflation-adjusted average annual incomes (which in addition to wages and salaries includes interest, dividend, and capital incomes) increased by 390% and 224%, respectively, for the top 0.1% and 1% of households in the US compared with a meagre 5% increase for the bottom 90% of households. In fact, all of the growth for the bottom 90% occurred between 1997 and 2000, followed by a period of declining incomes from 2000 and 2007.