Explore the vast range of titles available.

A landmark in contemporary social science, this pioneering work by Thomas Piketty explains the facts and dynamics of income inequality in France in the twentieth century. On its publication in French in 2001, it helped launch the international program led by Piketty and others to explore the grand patterns and causes of global inequality--research that has since transformed public debate. Appearing here in English for the first time, this stunning achievement will take its place alongside Capital in the Twenty-First Century as a modern classic of economic analysis. Top Incomes in France in the Twentieth Century is essential in part because of Piketty's unprecedented efforts to uncover, untangle, and present in clear form data about patterns in tax and inheritance in France dating back to 1900. But it is also an exceptional work of analysis, tracking and explaining with Piketty's characteristically lucid prose the effects of political conflict, war, and social change on the economic pressures and public policies that determined the lives of millions. A work of unusual intellectual power and ambition, Top Incomes in France in the Twentieth Century is vital reading for anyone concerned with the economic, political, and social history of France, and it is central to ongoing debates about social justice, inequality, taxation, and the evolution of capitalism around the world.-- Provided by publisher

Un ouvrage nécessaire qui éclaire et alimente le débat sur l'idée du revenu inconditionnel. L'idée d'instaurer un revenu inconditionnel réapparaît régulièrement dans le débat public français. Lors de la dernière campagne présidentielle, plusieurs personnalités politiques ont évoqué cette idée encore trop méconnue du grand public. Pour un revenu sans conditions reprend, en la complétant substantiellement et en l'actualisant, une partie de l'argumentation de l'ouvrage du même auteur, Un revenu pour tous, aujourd'hui épuisé. Ce livre se donne pour objectif d'éclairer et d'alimenter le débat en traitant la plupart des questions que le revenu inconditionnel soulève. Comment le financer? Qui voudra encore travailler? Faut-il craindre une immigration massive?... Autant de questions techniques qui appellent des réponses économiques, juridiques et sociologiques. Cet ouvrage n'élude pas le problème du caractère supposé utopique d'un tel projet. Peut-on raisonnablement en envisager une mise en œuvre prochaine? Au-delà de ces questions, c'est aussi celle de la justice sociale qui est traitée. Est-il juste de verser un revenu sans condition ni contrepartie? Peut-on être payé à ne rien faire? Le revenu inconditionnel est alors questionné et comparé à d'autres projets de transformation sociale, alternatifs ou complémentaires: monnaies locales, salaire à vie, droit opposable à l'emploi, etc. La dernière partie de l'ouvrage recense une multitude de petits pas qui nous permettraient de nous rapprocher d'un revenu inconditionnel: droit au temps libre, développement de l'économie sociale et solidaire, multiplication des espaces de gratuité, etc. Une analyse en prodonfeur des changements sociétaux impliqués par la mise en place du revenu universel. EXTRAITEn France, aujourd'hui, on compte plus de quatre millions de pauvres, et même plus de huit millions si l'on change de mode d'évaluation de la pauvreté. Cela signifie que, parmi nous, plus de huit millions de personnes vivent avec un niveau de vie inférieur à 950 euros par mois, et que plus de quatre millions doivent composer avec un niveau de vie inférieur à 800 euros. Quatre millions, huit millions, et ces chiffres ne cessent d'augmenter depuis le début des années 2000...À PROPOS DE L'AUTEUR Baptiste Mylondo est l'auteur de Des caddies et des hommes (La Dispute, 2005), Ne pas perdre sa vie à la gagner: pour un revenu de citoyenneté (Homnisphères, 2008), Un revenu pour tous (Éditions Utopia 2010).

\"Once a romanticized beacon of democracy, culture, and the arts, France has slowly slid further and further away from its historic image of liberty, equality and fraternity. The country is on the brink. With a precarious labor force facing dwindling wages, a right wing political surge that has resulted in drastic acts of Islamaphobia and Anti-Seminitism, and a media increasingly led by government cronies, France has entered an unprecedented era of social, political and economic turbulence. So, where is France heading, who runs it, and why does it matter? In Fixing France, French-Algerian journalist Nabila Ramdani gets to the very heart of a declining France racked with division. From the rise of Marine Le Pen to the segregated suburbs to the growing educational divide and wealth disparity, Ramdani offers a compelling and original critique of contemporary France. Deeply reported, the book is filled with interviews with senior public figures, including all presidents of the 21st century as well as with numerous ordinary French people who feel excluded by the powerbrokers and from the establishment institutions that run their lives. Yet, while Ramdani follows France's historical tradition of dissent, she simultaneously acknowledges that there is much to be hopeful about. What emerges is a true portrait of a country undergoing dramatic change and upheaval\"-- Provided by publisher.

This paper presents new findings on global inequality dynamics from the World Wealth and Income Database (WID.world), with particular emphasis on the contrast between the trends observed in the United States, China, France, and the United Kingdom. We observe rising top income and wealth shares in nearly all countries in recent decades. But the magnitude of the increase varies substantially, thereby suggesting that different country-specific policies and institutions matter considerably. Long-run wealth inequality dynamics appear to be highly unstable. We stress the need for more democratic transparency on income and wealth dynamics and better access to administrative and financial data.

The top 1 percent income share has more than doubled in the United States over the last 30 years, drawing much public attention in recent years. While other English-speaking countries have also experienced sharp increases in the top 1 percent income share, many high-income countries such as Japan, France, or Germany have seen much less increase in top income shares. Hence, the explanation cannot rely solely on forces common to advanced countries, such as the impact of new technologies and globalization on the supply and demand for skills. Moreover, the explanations have to accommodate the falls in top income shares earlier in the twentieth century experienced in virtually all high-income countries. We highlight four main factors. The first is the impact of tax policy, which has varied over time and differs across countries. Top tax rates have moved in the opposite direction from top income shares. The effects of top rate cuts can operate in conjunction with other mechanisms. The second factor is a richer view of the labor market, where we contrast the standard supply-side model with one where pay is determined by bargaining and the reactions to top rate cuts may lead simply to a redistribution of surplus. Indeed, top rate cuts may lead managerial energies to be diverted to increasing their remuneration at the expense of enterprise growth and employment. The third factor is capital income. Overall, private wealth (relative to income) has followed a U-shaped path over time, particularly in Europe, where inherited wealth is, in Europe if not in the United States, making a return. The fourth, little investigated, element is the correlation between earned income and capital income, which has substantially increased in recent decades in the United States.

Measuring and understanding the evolution of wealth inequality is a key challenge for researchers, policy makers, and the general public. This paper breaks new ground on this topic by presenting a new method to estimate and study wealth inequality. This method combines fiscal data with household surveys and national accounts in order to provide annual wealth distribution series, with detailed breakdowns by percentiles, age, and assets. Using the case of France as an illustration, we show that the resulting series can be used to better analyze the evolution and the determinants of wealth-inequality dynamics over the 1970–2014 period. We show that the decline in wealth inequality ends in the early 1980s, marking the beginning of a rise in the top 1% wealth share, though with significant fluctuations due largely to asset price movements. Rising inequality in savings rates coupled with highly stratified rates of returns has led to rising wealth concentration in spite of the opposing effect of house price increases. We develop a simple simulation model highlighting how changes in the combination of unequal savings rates, rates of return, and labor earnings that occurred in the early 1980s generated large multiplicative effects that led to radically different steady-state levels of wealth inequality. Taking advantage of the joint distribution of income and wealth, we show that top wealth holders are almost exclusively top capital earners, and increasingly fewer are made up of top labor earners; it has become increasingly difficult in recent decades to access top wealth groups with one's labor income only.

This paper provides estimates of federal tax rates by income groups in the United States since 1960, with special emphasis on very top income groups. We include individual and corporate income taxes, payroll taxes, and estate and gift taxes. The progressivity of the U.S. federal tax system at the top of the income distribution has declined dramatically since the 1960s. This dramatic drop in progressivity is due primarily to a drop in corporate taxes and in estate and gift taxes combined with a sharp change in the composition of top incomes away from capital income and toward labor income. The sharp drop in statutory top marginal individual income tax rates has contributed only moderately to the decline in tax progressivity. International comparisons confirm that is it critical to take into account other taxes than the individual income tax to properly assess the extent of overall tax progressivity, both for time trends and for cross-country comparisons. The pattern for the United Kingdom is similar to the U.S. pattern. France had less progressive taxes than the United States or the United Kingdom in 1970 but has experienced an increase in tax progressivity and has now a more progressive tax system than the United States or the United Kingdom.

Top income inequality rose sharply in the United States over the last 40 years but increased only slightly in France and Japan. Why? We explore a model in which heterogeneous entrepreneurs, broadly interpreted, exert effort to generate exponential growth in their incomes, which tends to raise inequality. Creative destruction by outside innovators restrains this expansion and induces top incomes to obey a Pareto distribution. Economic forces that affect these twomechanisms—including information technology, taxes, and policies related to innovation blocking—may explain the varied patterns of top income inequality that we see in the data.

Starting in the early 1990s, countries in southern Europe experienced low productivity growth alongside declining real interest rates. We use data for manufacturing firms in Spain between 1999 and 2012 to document a significant increase in the dispersion of the return to capital across firms, a stable dispersion of the return to labor, and a significant increase in productivity losses from capital misallocation over time. We develop a model with size-dependent financial frictions that is consistent with important aspects of firms’ behavior in production and balance sheet data. We illustrate how the decline in the real interest rate, often attributed to the euro convergence process, leads to a significant decline in sectoral total factor productivity as capital inflows are misallocated toward firms that have higher net worth but are not necessarily more productive. We show that similar trends in dispersion and productivity losses are observed in Italy and Portugal but not in Germany, France, and Norway.

This paper presents new findings from the World Top Incomes Database and discusses some of their policy implications. In particular, the paper provides updated top income series for the United States—including new estimates through 2010, showing a strong rebound of the top 1 percent income share, following the 2008-09 sharp fall. It also presents updated income series for other developed countries (including the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and Japan) and new series on wealth-income ratios. In light of this extended set of country series, the paper analyzes the relative importance of market and institutional forces in explaining observed cross-country trends, and the likely impact of the Great recession on these long-term evolutions. It discusses the policy implications of the findings, both in terms of optimal tax policy and regarding the interplay between inequality and macroeconomic fragility.