IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/bdi/opques/qef_428_18.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Wealth inequality in Italy: reconstruction of 1968-75 data and comparison with recent estimates

Author

Listed:
  • Luigi Cannari

    (Bank of Italy)

  • Giovanni D�Alessio

    (Bank of Italy)

Abstract

This paper provides a reconstruction of the joint distribution of Italian households� income and wealth in the years ranging from 1968 to 1975. Exploiting the information available in some historical reports recently published by the Bank of Italy, the paper reconstructs synthetic microdata compatible with the aggregate results of sample surveys carried out in those years. In this way, inequality and poverty can be estimated by using the same statistical criteria that are used today, making an intertemporal comparison of the estimates possible. The concentration of household wealth shows a downward trend in the 1970s and �80s, an increase in the years following the 1992-93 crisis and relative stability in the new century. In the period 1968-75 the concentration of wealth turns out to be greater than in recent years. The estimates of relative poverty show a decreasing trend until the 1990s and a subsequent increase; the upward trend of these indicators in recent years is steeper than that of the concentration indices. Migration flows have contributed significantly to the recent growth in the poverty indices.

Suggested Citation

  • Luigi Cannari & Giovanni D�Alessio, 2018. "Wealth inequality in Italy: reconstruction of 1968-75 data and comparison with recent estimates," Questioni di Economia e Finanza (Occasional Papers) 428, Bank of Italy, Economic Research and International Relations Area.
    • Handle: RePEc:bdi:opques:qef_428_18
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.bancaditalia.it/pubblicazioni/qef/2018-0428/QEF_428_18.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Andrea Brandolini, 1999. "The Distribution of Personal Income in Post-War Italy: Source Description, Data Quality, and the Time Pattern of Income Inequality," Giornale degli Economisti, GDE (Giornale degli Economisti e Annali di Economia), Bocconi University, vol. 58(2), pages 183-239, September.
    2. Andrea Brandolini & Silvia Magri & Timothy M. Smeeding, 2010. "Asset-based measurement of poverty," Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 29(2), pages 267-284.
    3. Paolo Acciari & Salvatore Morelli, 2020. "Wealth Transfers and Net Wealth at Death: Evidence from the Italian Inheritance Tax Records 1995–2016," NBER Chapters, in: Measuring Distribution and Mobility of Income and Wealth, pages 175-203, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    4. Janet C. Gornick & Eva Sierminska & Timothy M. Smeeding, 2009. "The Income and Wealth Packages of Older Women in Cross-National Perspective," The Journals of Gerontology: Series B, The Gerontological Society of America, vol. 64(3), pages 402-414.
    5. Guido Alfani, 2017. "The rich in historical perspective: evidence for preindustrial Europe (ca. 1300–1800)," Cliometrica, Springer;Cliometric Society (Association Francaise de Cliométrie), vol. 11(3), pages 321-348, September.
    6. Anthony B. Atkinson & Andrea Brandolini, 2011. "On the identification of the “middle class”," Working Papers 217, ECINEQ, Society for the Study of Economic Inequality.
    7. Giovanni D'Alessio & Andrea Neri, 2015. "Income and wealth sample estimates consistent with macro aggregates: some experiments," Questioni di Economia e Finanza (Occasional Papers) 272, Bank of Italy, Economic Research and International Relations Area.
    8. Anthony F. Shorrocks & Guanghua Wan, 2008. "Ungrouping Income Distributions: Synthesising Samples for Inequality and Poverty Analysis," WIDER Working Paper Series RP2008-16, World Institute for Development Economic Research (UNU-WIDER).
    9. Graham Pyatt & Chau-nan Chen & John Fei, 1980. "The Distribution of Income by Factor Components," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 95(3), pages 451-473.
    10. Robert Tanton, 2014. "A Review of Spatial Microsimulation Methods," International Journal of Microsimulation, International Microsimulation Association, vol. 7(1), pages 4-25.
    11. Romina Gambacorta, 2017. "Immigration and Poverty: The Case of Italy," Research on Economic Inequality, in: Research on Economic Inequality, volume 25, pages 229-257, Emerald Group Publishing Limited.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Giovanni D’Alessio, 2021. "What do Italians think about tax evasion?," Questioni di Economia e Finanza (Occasional Papers) 607, Bank of Italy, Economic Research and International Relations Area.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Salvatore Morelli & Timothy Smeeding & Jeffrey Thompson, 2014. "Post-1970 Trends in Within-Country Inequality and Poverty: Rich and Middle Income Countries," CSEF Working Papers 356, Centre for Studies in Economics and Finance (CSEF), University of Naples, Italy.
    2. Andrea Brandolini & Luigi Cannari & Giovanni D’Alessio & Ivan Faiella, 2006. "Household Wealth Distribution in Italy in the 1990s," Chapters, in: Edward N. Wolff (ed.), International Perspectives on Household Wealth, chapter 7, Edward Elgar Publishing.
    3. Müller, Philip & Schmidt, Tobias, 2015. "Identifying income and wealth-poor households in the euro area," Discussion Papers 35/2015, Deutsche Bundesbank.
    4. Michele Cantarella & Andrea Neri & Maria Giovanna Ranalli, 2021. "Mind the wealth gap: a new allocation method to match micro and macro statistics for household wealth," Papers 2101.01085, arXiv.org, revised Jan 2021.
    5. Durr-e-Nayab, 2011. "Estimating the Middle Class in Pakistan," The Pakistan Development Review, Pakistan Institute of Development Economics, vol. 50(1), pages 1-28.
    6. Martina Menon & Federico Perali & Eva Sierminska, 2016. "An asset-based indicator of wellbeing for a unified means testing tool: Money metric or counting approach?," Working Papers 421, ECINEQ, Society for the Study of Economic Inequality.
    7. Andrea Brandolini, 2021. "The poverty debate in Italy: from politics to statistics," Questioni di Economia e Finanza (Occasional Papers) 648, Bank of Italy, Economic Research and International Relations Area.
    8. Andrea Brandolini & Silvia Magri & Timothy M. Smeeding, 2010. "Asset-based measurement of poverty," Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 29(2), pages 267-284.
    9. Giovanni D'Alessio, 2020. "A comparative evaluation of poverty measures in the Italian Survey of Household Income and Wealth," Politica economica, Società editrice il Mulino, issue 1, pages 101-140.
    10. Marchand, J. & Smeeding, T., 2016. "Poverty and Aging," Handbook of the Economics of Population Aging, in: Piggott, John & Woodland, Alan (ed.), Handbook of the Economics of Population Aging, edition 1, volume 1, chapter 0, pages 905-950, Elsevier.
      • Marchand, Joseph & Smeeding, Timothy, 2016. "Poverty and Aging," Working Papers 2016-11, University of Alberta, Department of Economics, revised 20 Nov 2016.
    11. Orsetta Causa & Mikkel Hermansen & Nicolas Ruiz & Caroline Klein & Zuzana Smidova, 2016. "Inequality in Denmark through the Looking Glass," OECD Economics Department Working Papers 1341, OECD Publishing.
    12. Carlo V. Fiorio, 2006. "Understanding Inequality Trends:Microsimulation Decomposition for Italy," STICERD - Distributional Analysis Research Programme Papers 78, Suntory and Toyota International Centres for Economics and Related Disciplines, LSE.
    13. Martina Menon & Federico Perali & Eva Sierminska, 2017. "An Efficiency Comparison of Means Testing Tools: Money Metric or Counting Approach?," CHILD Working Papers Series 57 JEL Classification: D1, Centre for Household, Income, Labour and Demographic Economics (CHILD) - CCA.
    14. Daniele Checchi & Laura Pagani, 2005. "The effects of unions on wage inequality. The Italian case in the 1990s," Politica economica, Società editrice il Mulino, issue 1, pages 43-70.
    15. Çakır, Mustafa Yavuz & Kabundi, Alain, 2013. "Trade shocks from BRIC to South Africa: A global VAR analysis," Economic Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 32(C), pages 190-202.
    16. Inhoe Ku & Chang-O Kim & J Scott Brown, 2020. "Decomposition Analyses of the Trend in Poverty Among Older Adults: The Case of South Korea," The Journals of Gerontology: Series B, The Gerontological Society of America, vol. 75(3), pages 684-693.
    17. Estudillo, Jonna P. & Quisumbing, Agnes R. & Otsuka, Keijiro, 2001. "Income distribution in rice-growing villages during the post-Green Revolution periods: the Philippine case, 1985 and 1998," Agricultural Economics, Blackwell, vol. 25(1), pages 71-84, June.
    18. Taylor, J. Edward, 1992. "Remittances and inequality reconsidered: Direct, indirect, and intertemporal effects," Journal of Policy Modeling, Elsevier, vol. 14(2), pages 187-208, April.
    19. Vanesa Jorda & Jos Mar a Sarabia & Markus J ntti, 2020. "Estimation of Income Inequality from Grouped Data," LIS Working papers 804, LIS Cross-National Data Center in Luxembourg.
    20. Delorme, Francois & St-Cerny, Suzie, 2014. "La classe moyenne au Québec s’érode-t-elle vraiment : Contour et évolution [Is Quebec's Middle Class Really Shrinking : Overview and Evolution]," MPRA Paper 85051, University Library of Munich, Germany.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    wealth; income; inequality; poverty; synthetic data;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D31 - Microeconomics - - Distribution - - - Personal Income and Wealth Distribution
    • D63 - Microeconomics - - Welfare Economics - - - Equity, Justice, Inequality, and Other Normative Criteria and Measurement
    • I32 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Welfare, Well-Being, and Poverty - - - Measurement and Analysis of Poverty
    • C15 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Econometric and Statistical Methods and Methodology: General - - - Statistical Simulation Methods: General

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:bdi:opques:qef_428_18. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/bdigvit.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.