Top Indian Incomes, 1922-2000

Banerjee, Abhijit ; Piketty, Thomas

Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank

关键词: AVERAGE GROWTH;    AVERAGE INCOME;    AVERAGE INCOMES;    CAPITAL CONCENTRATION;    COMMODITIES;   

DOI  :  10.1093/wber/lhi001
RP-ID  :  77486

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: World Bank Open Knowledge Repository

【 摘 要 】

This article presents data on theevolution of top incomes and wages for 1922-2000 in Indiausing individual tax return data. The data show that theshares of the top 0.01 percent, 0.1 percent, and 1 percentin total income shrank substantially from the 1950s to theearly to mid-1980s but then rose again, so that today theseshares are only slightly below what they were in the 1920sand 1930s. This U-shaped pattern is broadly consistent withthe evolution of economic policy in India: from the 1950s tothe early to mid-1980s was a period of''socialist'' policies in India, whereasthe subsequent period, starting with the rise of RajivGandhi, saw a gradual shift toward more pro-businesspolicies. Although the initial share of the top income groupwas small, the fact that the rich were getting richer had anontrivial impact on the overall income distribution.Although the impact is not large enough to fully explain thegap observed during the 1990s between average consumptiongrowths shown in National Sample Survey based data and thenational accounts based data, it is sufficiently large toexplain a non-negligible part of it.