Top Incomes in Korea: Update, 1933-2016"

This study updates data on Korea's top income shares (Kim and Kim 2014) in the World Inequality Database up to 2016. The national account statistics were revised in accordance with the System of National Accounts (SNA) in 2008, and income tax data have become more substantial, including information on tax exemptions. A new interpolation method for income tax data in tabular form called Generalized Pareto Curves was proposed. Top income shares are updated to reflect these changes in data and method. As a result of the update, the sharp rise in top income shares has been somewhat alleviated since the mid-1990s. The inequality of earned income has been showing constant improvement since 2010 because the income of workers in the bottom 50% has increased more rapidly than that of workers in the top 10%. On the other hand, the concentration of unearned income, consisting mainly of business income and financial income, has become weaker, but continues to grow. Accordingly, the concentration of total income for both tended to decrease or stagnate in the first half of the 2010s, but recently began to rise again, as the increase in the concentration of unearned income has been faster than the decline in the concentration of earned income.