Top Indian Incomes, 1922-2000
This article presents data on the evolution of top incomes and wages for 1922-2000 in India using individual tax return data. The data show that the shares of the top 0.01 percent, 0.1 percent, and 1 percent in total income shrank substantially fro...
| Main Authors: | , |
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| Format: | Journal Article |
| Language: | English en_US |
| Published: |
Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank
2014
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/2005/01/17747442/top-indian-incomes-1922-2000 http://hdl.handle.net/10986/16482 |
| Summary: | This article presents data on the
evolution of top incomes and wages for 1922-2000 in India
using individual tax return data. The data show that the
shares of the top 0.01 percent, 0.1 percent, and 1 percent
in total income shrank substantially from the 1950s to the
early to mid-1980s but then rose again, so that today these
shares are only slightly below what they were in the 1920s
and 1930s. This U-shaped pattern is broadly consistent with
the evolution of economic policy in India: from the 1950s to
the early to mid-1980s was a period of
''socialist'' policies in India, whereas
the subsequent period, starting with the rise of Rajiv
Gandhi, saw a gradual shift toward more pro-business
policies. Although the initial share of the top income group
was small, the fact that the rich were getting richer had a
nontrivial impact on the overall income distribution.
Although the impact is not large enough to fully explain the
gap observed during the 1990s between average consumption
growths shown in National Sample Survey based data and the
national accounts based data, it is sufficiently large to
explain a non-negligible part of it. |
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