Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/119749 
Year of Publication: 
2015
Series/Report no.: 
LIS Working Paper Series No. 629
Publisher: 
Luxembourg Income Study (LIS), Luxembourg
Abstract: 
The relationship between income inequality and polarization is an empirical fact: a change in equality might occur together with a change in polarization. At the same time, polarization might emerge while inequality remains constant. The outcome of this process entails relevant information about the evolution of the income distribution. We exploit the LIS micro-data to perform a relative distribution analysis for six European countries. Our aim is describing how both the market and the disposable income distributions evolved over time. The results indicate that polarization increased in all the considered countries, being the largest in the United Kingdom and the smallest in Italy. At the beginning of the period the relative polarization of disposable income is lower than the one for market income. In time, however, this pattern is reversed. This evidence does not unambiguously suggest an increasing effectiveness of the equalizing role of the welfare state. Nonetheless, in all the countries downgrading prevails over upgrading: the relevance of the middle-class getting poorer is larger than the one of the middle-class getting richer.
Subjects: 
income distribution
polarization
inequality
relative distribution methods
JEL: 
C14
D31
D63
I32
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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