This study provides a detailed descriptive analysis of income inequality within the European Union (EU) over the last three decades, a period covering its expansion to include 13 new member states, mostly transition economies. We examine income inequality at three levels: between countries, within countries, and EU as if it were an entity. Despite GDP convergence among member states, we find increased within-country inequality, particularly in newly acceded members, contrasting with modest rises in established EU countries. Although initial inequality levels were lower in the newer EU countries, they have escalated to match or exceed those in the older member states. We also uncover disproportional income growth pattern across the combined EU income distribution, with lower-middle-income brackets seeing significant gains, though the highest increases are found among the top earners.

This study explores the potential of personal income tax (PIT) to address inequality in African countries. We employ new data on PIT design and reforms from the TaxDev Employment Income Taxes Dataset (EITD) alongside data on pre-tax income distributions from the World Inequality Database (WID) to model the redistributive capacity of PIT regimes in Africa and the extent to which reforms between 1995 and 2020 have affected this capacity. We find that, on average across the sample period, PIT could reduce inequality by around 4.1 Gini points if applied to the entire income distribution. Focusing specifically on policy design, cross-country regressions show that the level of the top marginal PIT rate, and the point at which it is applied, matter most for its potential effects on inequality. Crucially, we find that PIT reforms over the period in question have, on average, lessened the redistributive capacity of PIT.

This paper presents the first systematic attempt to create cross-country comparable measures of spatial wage disparities between and within similarly-defined local labour market areas (LLMAs) for Canada, France, (West) Germany, the UK, and the US since the 1970s and assesses their contribution to national inequality. By the end of the 2010s, spatial inequalities in LLMA mean wages are similar in Canada, France, Germany and the UK; the US exhibits the highest degree of spatial inequality. Over the study period, spatial inequalities have nearly doubled in all countries, except for France where spatial inequalities have fallen back to 1970s levels. Due to a concomitant increase in within-place inequality, the contribution of places in explaining national wage inequality has remained fairly constant over the 40-year study period, except in the UK where we document a significant increase.

This paper expands the traditional concept of disposable income by including in-kind benefits for education and health and consumption taxes into the analysis. This extended view on tax-benefit systems offers a more comprehensive understanding of redistribution mechanisms within countries and facilitates cross-country comparisons. In a first step, our analysis identifies households as either net contributors or net beneficiaries. Our results reveal significant variability in net fiscal contributions across households, influenced by factors such as income level, household composition, and age. We find that extending the income concept reduces the number of net contributor households. In a second step, we take a life-cycle perspective, estimating the contribution of each age cohort in each EU Member State. Our results highlight that individuals contribute very differently over the life cycle across the Member States, and that these contributions are highly correlated with the retirement decisions of individuals.