Structural inequality: The case of Sweden

Olof Robling; Jon Pareliussen

doi:https://doi.org/10.1787/c0c7e531-en

Documents de travail du Département des Affaires économiques de l'OCDE

Documents de travail du Département des affaires économiques de l’OCDE recouvrant toutes les activités de ce département : conjoncture économique, analyse politique et projections ; politique fiscale, dépenses publiques et fiscalité ; questions structurelles dont le vieillissement, la croissance et la productivité, la migration, l’environnement, le capital humain, le logement, les échanges et les investissements, les marchés de l’emploi, la réforme réglementaire, la concurrence, la santé et d’autres thèmes.

English, French

More On
- Economie

ISSN: 18151973 (online)
https://doi.org/10.1787/18151973

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Structural inequality

The case of Sweden

Structural trends not directly related to labour market functioning and redistribution have made a sizeable contribution to inequality and poverty in Sweden, but occupy only limited space in the income inequality debate. To fill this gap, we put a quarter of a century of rising inequality in Sweden in a new perspective by quantifying the effect of changing household composition, age structure, industry structure, educational attainment and immigration on inequality. The influence of structural changes on inequality is derived from micro-data from Statistics Sweden. We re-weigh subgroups of the population with certain characteristics by their population shares in 1987 to construct counterfactual income distributions for 2013 and derive inequality measures that we compare to their actual 2013 values. We find that almost half of the inequality increase between 1987 and 2013 can be mechanically ascribed to these factors.

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English

More On
- Economie

Keywords: Income distribution, structural trends, demographics, immigration, poverty

JEL: I24: Health, Education, and Welfare / Education and Research Institutions / Education and Inequality; L16: Industrial Organization / Market Structure, Firm Strategy, and Market Performance / Industrial Organization and Macroeconomics: Industrial Structure and Structural Change; Industrial Price Indices; J11: Labor and Demographic Economics / Demographic Economics / Demographic Trends, Macroeconomic Effects, and Forecasts; J15: Labor and Demographic Economics / Demographic Economics / Economics of Minorities, Races, Indigenous Peoples, and Immigrants; Non-labor Discrimination; J14: Labor and Demographic Economics / Demographic Economics / Economics of the Elderly; Economics of the Handicapped; Non-Labor Market Discrimination; I32: Health, Education, and Welfare / Welfare, Well-Being, and Poverty / Measurement and Analysis of Poverty; J12: Labor and Demographic Economics / Demographic Economics / Marriage; Marital Dissolution; Family Structure; Domestic Abuse; D31: Microeconomics / Distribution / Personal Income, Wealth, and Their Distributions

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