World Inequality Report 2022

We live in a data-abundant world and yet we lack basic information about inequality. Economic growth numbers are published every year by governments across the globe, but they do not tell us about how growth is distributed across the population – about who gains and who loses from economic policies. Accessing such data is critical for democracy. Beyond income and wealth, it is also critical to improve our collective capability to measure and monitor other dimensions of socio- economic disparities, including gender and environmental inequalities. Open-access, transparent, reliable inequality information is a global public good.This report presents the most up-to-date synthesis of international research efforts to track global inequalities. The data and analysis presented here are based on the work of more than 100 researchers over four years, located on all continents, contributing to the World Inequality Database (WID.world), maintained by the World Inequality Lab. This vast network collaborates with statistical institutions, tax authorities, universities and international organizations, to harmonize, analyze and disseminate comparable international inequality data

Exiting the crisis in the right direction: A sustainable and shared prosperity plan for Europe

This paper investigates the synergies between the policy response to the European crisis and the green economy. We begin by examining the causes of the European crisis, including the potential role played by resource constraints, in particular the rise in oil prices 2004-2008. Then we develop a matrix to assess the synergies between the crisis response and the green economy. We survey the literature on three green economy instruments, namely environmental fiscal reform, green investment and environmental innovation. We then assess their coherence with and potential contribution to the current crisis response

Exiting the crisis in the right direction: A sustainable and shared prosperity plan for Europe

This paper investigates the synergies between the policy response to the European crisis and the green economy. We begin by examining the causes of the European crisis, including the potential role played by resource constraints, in particular the rise in oil prices 2004-2008. Then we develop a matrix to assess the synergies between the crisis response and the green economy. We survey the literature on three green economy instruments, namely environmental fiscal reform, green investment and environmental innovation. We then assess their coherence with and potential contribution to the current crisis response

Nouvelles représentations des consommations d'énergie

Brochur

Insoutenables inégalités? Essais sur les inégalités mondiales de revenu et de pollution

Chapter I, entitled “Indian income inequality dynamics, 1922-2015: From British Raj to Billionaire Raj?” , discusses the methodological issues at stake when reconstructing historical income inequality series in a country as populated as India, but with very scarce data. The chapter shows that despite many important data limitations, one can combine tax data, surveys and national accounts in a systematic manner to reconstruct income inequality estimates robust to a wide range of alternative strategies. In the case of India, the results are striking as they reveal that income inequality is currently at its highest level since the creation of the Indian Income tax in 1922. The top 1% capture more than 22% of national income today, up from 6% in the mid-1980s, when the top 1% captured about 6% of total income. Chapter II, entitled “Building a global income distribution brick by brick” , builds on chapter I (and many other similar endeavors carried out by my colleagues at the WIL) to construct a global distribution of income based on a systematic combination of tax, survey data and national accounts. Our results are notable as some go against preconceived ideas on globalization and its impacts on economic inequality. In particular, we show that the global top 1% captured twice as much global income growth as the bottom 50% since 1980. We demonstrate that inequality increased, rather than decreased between world individuals since 1980, despite strong growth in the emerging world. In other words, rising inequality within countries was stronger than the effect of reduced inequality between countries since 1980. Looking into the future, the chapter also reveals that under “Business as Usual”, global inequality is likely to further rise (despite strong growth in emerging regions) contrary to what has been argued in academic and public debates on the matter. The Appendices to the chapter present the details of the method and reveal that our results are robust alternative strategies to account for missing data at the country level.How to move from global income inequality to global environmental inequality? A first step is to understand the role of income and non-income drivers of individual pollution levels within countries. This is the work that is discussed in Chapter III, entitled “Are younger generations higher carbon emitters than their elders?” , which focuses on the determinants of individual level CO2 emissions and focus on the role of income, technology and other factors, such as date of birth. We show that the French baby-boom generation emitted relatively more CO2 than their parents and their children, throughout their lifetime (about 20% more direct CO2 emissions). This is due to a combination of income, technological lock-in and cultural effects. Chapter IV, entitled “Carbon and inequality: From Kyoto to Paris” , builds on the results obtained in the previous chapters to construct a global distribution of carbon emissions. At the time of writing this chapter, global income inequality estimates presented in Chapter II were not available, so we had to rely on work done by other researchers to obtain global income series (Lakner and Milanovic, 2015). These were corrected with tax data and then used to reconstruct a global carbon emissions database. We show that the top 10% emitters account for about 45% of global emissions today and that twenty years ago, global inequality of carbon emissions was essentially a between-country inequality phenomena. Today, the situation is being reversed as within-country emissions inequality accounts for as much of global emissions inequality as the between-country dimension. On the basis of our results, we propose schemes to better share contributions to climate adaptation funds. The history of climate negotiations shows the extreme difficulty to implement any kinds of allocation rules to share a climate burden.Cette thèse porte sur la dynamique des inégalités de revenu et de pollution entre individus, à l’intérieur des pays et au niveau mondial. Plus précisément, l'objectif de ces travaux est de mieux mesurer et mieux comprendre les déterminants de la dynamique sur moyen ou long terme des inégalités de revenu à l'échelle d’un pays (chapitre I) ou au niveau mondial (chapitre II). Il s'agit également de mieux comprendre et mesurer les liens articulant les inégalités de revenu aux inégalités environnementales au niveau national (chapitre III) et mondial (chapitre IV). Enfin, la thèse discute de l’impact des indicateurs de mesure des inégalités sur l'action politique (chapitres V et VI)

Global carbon inequality over 1990–2019

All humans contribute to climate change but not equally. Here I estimate the global inequality of individual greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions between 1990 and 2019 using a newly assembled dataset of income and wealth inequality, environmental input-output tables and a framework differentiating emissions from consumption and investments. In my benchmark estimates, I find that the bottom 50% of the world population emitted 12% of global emissions in 2019, whereas the top 10% emitted 48% of the total. Since 1990, the bottom 50% of the world population has been responsible for only 16% of all emissions growth, whereas the top 1% has been responsible for 23% of the total. While per-capita emissions of the global top 1% increased since 1990, emissions from low- and middle-income groups within rich countries declined. Contrary to the situation in 1990, 63% of the global inequality in individual emissions is now due to a gap between low and high emitters within countries rather than between countries. Finally, the bulk of total emissions from the global top 1% of the world population comes from their investments rather than from their consumption. These findings have implications for contemporary debates on fair climate policies and stress the need for governments to develop better data on individual emissions to monitor progress towards sustainable lifestyles