Economic inequality in Australia: A reassessment

Abstract

This article reviews and analyses the evidence on the distribution of income and wealth in Australia since the 1960s. A number of scholars – most prominently among them Thomas Piketty – suggest that inequality has been increasing across the advanced capitalist world. Kuznets’ benign picture of an ‘inverted u-curve’ depicting declining inequality in modern industrial society is replaced with an altogether different and potentially quite alarming one. Does this hold for Australia? Surveying 25 income trend and 17 wealth distribution studies, we draw on the best available evidence and find that overall there has been far less of a rising inequality trend than is often assumed or argued.

本文分析了1960年代以来澳大利亚的收入及财富分配。有一些学者——其中最著名的是托马斯·皮凯提——认为所有发达资本主义国家的不平等都在加大。库兹涅倒U曲线所描绘的近代工业社会不平等不断减弱的美丽图画被一个全然不同、令人震惊的景象所取代。那么澳大利亚也是这样么？笔者考察25种收入趋势、17种财富分配的研究后发现，总的来说，不平等远并不像人们所常说的那样增加。

Keywords:

• Australia
• income distribution
• inequality
• Thomas Piketty
• wealth distribution

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The Gini coefficient is an index of the inequality among values of a frequency distribution (Gini 2005). A Gini coefficient of zero represents perfect equality, while a Gini coefficient of one represents perfect inequality. Typically, the coefficient is expressed in two (e.g., 0.23) or three decimal (e.g., 0.341) places. Using the three-decimal system (as we do in this article), one can talk of there being 1000 Gini ‘points’.