Here’s an instructive graphic (click to enlarge), produced for social affairs ministers at an OECD seminar in Paris over the last few days on rising income inequality. You don’t need the OECD to tell you that extreme social inequality is a growing scourge, and that it tends to be highest as far as advanced economies are concerned in the English speaking nations, particularly the US and the UK. But what this chart shows is that it is growing almost everywhere, and that includes places where you least expect to find it. Countries such as Denmark, Germany, Sweden and Finland, which traditionally have had low inequality, are no longer spared from the trend. In fact, they’ve all had a rather bigger increase in inequality than even the UK over the past twenty years. Levels of inequality seem to be converging at a common and higher average.
We can only guess at what the figures look like for the non OECD developing nations of the world. Despite huge economic progress, already high inequality in China and India will have been growing even faster than it has in the advanced economies. (read more)
