We study post-Apartheid inequality dynamics in South Africa using a new microdatabase that combines survey, tax, national accounts, and budget data from 1993 to 2019. Until 2005, pretax inequality rose, racial disparities widened, and redistribution stagnated. Thereafter, pretax inequality fell back toward its 1993 level, while major expansions in tax-and-transfer progressivity sharply reduced posttax inequality. Rapid growth of top Black incomes contributed to halving the White-to-Black pretax income ratio and shifted 20% of taxes from Whites to top Black earners. Despite reaching its lowest point in history in 2019, the racial gap remains extreme by international standards, even after redistribution.

This paper constructs the first Distributional National Accounts (DINA) for Switzerland, covering 2003–2022, by linking individual-level income and wealth tax data with national accounts. The Swiss DINA provide a comprehensive measure of income and wealth inequality, capturing all components of national income rather than relying solely on tax statistics. They allow us to assess how economic growth has been distributed, who bears the burden of income, wealth, corporate, and consumption taxes, and how progressive the overall tax system is. The individual-level data enable analysis of the joint distribution of income and wealth, as well as differences by gender and age. Exploiting Switzerland’s fiscal decentralization, we examine the distributional effects of local tax competition and evaluate how the wealth tax—about 12% of personal tax revenue—shapes overall progressivity. Our approach combines detailed tax records, survey data, and national accounts, with full tax coverage eliminating the need to impute non-filers.

We use population-wide administrative micro-data to provide new estimates of income inequality and effective tax rates by income groups in Brazil. Our data allow us to link businesses to their owners and thus to allocate business income and associated taxes to the corresponding individual firm owners. We provide sharp upward revisions to official inequality estimates: the top 1% earns 27.4% of total income in 2019, one of the highest level recorded in the world. The tax system, which relies heavily on consumption taxes, is regressive: while the average tax rate in the economy is 42.5%, this rate falls to 20.6% for million-dollar earners (roughly the top 0.01%), due to the non-taxation of dividends and provisions that reduce corporate tax liabilities. We provide evidence suggesting that inequality in developing countries may be systematically underestimated, as even in Brazil - where dividends are untaxed - attributing profits to business owners substantially raises income inequality.

In this paper, we investigate the economic divide between East and West German residents along the regional income and wealth distributions employing the Distributional National Accounts method, which aligns microdata with national accounts. We find that East German residents still earn and own a fraction of their West German counterparts. The gap widens towards the top of the distribution due to East Germans’ lower business income and wealth.

Investigating the causes, we find that reunification boosted West German top incomes. We link this to the privatization process of the 1990s in which pre-dominantly top West German investors acquired formerly state-owned East German capital and received higher returns on their investment. Persistent characteristics of businesses owned by either East or West Germans, such as the number of employees, firm structure and legal form, explain a rising share of the persistent productivity gap.