Chancel L., Piketty T., Saez E., Zucman G. (eds.) World Inequality Report 2022

Report. — Cambridge, London: The Belknap Press, The World Inequality Lab, 2022. — 453 p.This report draws on recent research articles. The report also draws on the extensive work of researchers associated to the World Inequality Database available at www.wid.world.Produced by a team of world-leading economists, this is the benchmark account of recent and historical trends in inequality.World Inequality Report 2022 is the most authoritative and comprehensive account available of global trends in inequality. Researched, compiled, and written by a team of world-leading economists, the report builds on the pioneering edition of 2018 to provide policy makers and scholars everywhere up-to-date information about an ever broader range of countries and about forms of inequality that researchers have previously ignored or found hard to trace.Over the past decade, inequality has taken center stage in public debate as the wealthiest people in most parts of the world have seen their share of the economy soar relative to that of others. The resulting political and social pressures have posed harsh new challenges for governments and created a pressing demand for reliable data. The World Inequality Lab, housed at the Paris School of Economics and the University of California, Berkeley, has answered this call by coordinating research into the latest trends in the accumulation and distribution of income and wealth on every continent. This new report not only extends the lab’s international reach but provides crucial new information about the history of inequality, gender inequality, environmental inequalities, and trends in international tax reform and redistribution.World Inequality Report 2022 will be a key document for anyone concerned about one of the most imperative and contentious subjects in contemporary politics and economics.The job of holding up a mirror to the world can be a frustrating one. When the news is persistently bad, when the mirror highlights more wrinkles than we want to face up to, it is easy enough to find excuses — we are about to turn the corner, there is no other way to go, efficiency demands this, think of all the other good things that are happening, and the evergreen favorite, the data is wrong. Chasing down each of these narratives and slaying them takes stubbornness and hard work. Over the last twenty-five years, Thomas Piketty has been leading this fight, first by himself, then with Emmanuel Saez, Facundo Alvaredo, and the late Sir Tony Atkinson and, increasingly, with a growing team of collaborators, culminating in the World Inequality Lab.This report is the current flagship product of the Lab, prepared under the leadership of Lucas Chancel and also coordinated by Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman. It is the product of a relentless data amassment which makes it possible to provide better answers to almost every question we want to ask about what is happening to inequality world-wide. The answer is not pretty. In every large region of the world with the exception of Europe, the share of the bottom 50% in total earnings is less than 15% (less than ten in Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa and MENA region) while the share of the richest 10% is over 40% and in many of the regions, closer to 60%. But what is perhaps even more striking is what is happening to wealth. The share of the bottom 50% of the world in total global wealth is 2% by their estimates, while the share of the top 10% is 76%. Since wealth is a major source of future economic gains, and increasingly, of power and influence, this presages further increases in inequality. Indeed, at the heart of this explosion is the extreme concentration of the economic power in the hands of a very small minority of the super-rich. The wealth of the top 10% globally, which constitutes the middle class in rich countries and the merely rich in poor countries is actually growing slower than the world average, but the top 1% is growing much faster: between 1995 and 2021, the top 1% captured 38% of the global increment in wealth, while the bottom 50% captured a frightening 2%. The share of wealth owned by the global top 0.1% rose from 7% to 11% over that period and global billionaire wealth soared. With the boom in the stock market, the picture does not seem to be getting better.Global economic inequality: insights
Global inequality from 1820 to now: the persistence and mutation of extreme inequality
Rich countries, poor governments
Global wealth inequality: the rise of multimillionaires
Half the sky? The female labor income share from a global perspective
Global carbon inequality
The road to redistributing wealth
Taxing multinationals or taxing wealthy individuals?
Global vs unilateral perspectives on tax justice
Emancipation, redistribution and sustainability
Glossary - Country-sheets