2017년 3월 26일 일요일

[발췌] 소득 불평등과 재분배의 불평등 교정 수준의 선진권 국가 간 비교



※ 발췌 (excerpts):

1. 출처: Income Inequality in the United States in Cross-National Perspective: Redistribution Revisited. Luxembourg Income Study Center. May 2015.
지은이: Janet C. Gornick (Director, LIS and LIS Center) and Branko Milanovic (Senior Scholar, LIS Center)

What Figure 1 tells us is that it is not an exceptionally high level of market income inequality that makes US disposable income inequality high (in fact, higheest among these countries); it is the relatively meager level of redistribution. ( ... ... )

At the same time, it is well-established that the US wage distribution is more unequal than wage distributions in many other─esp European─countries. The US' high level of wage inequality is due to both relatively low wages at the bottom and extremely high wages at the top. Wage inequality and market income inequality are not directly comparable, because wage inequality is calculated across wage eaners only, while the market income inequality is calculated across household (incl. those with zero market income) and it includes some capital income. ( ... ) [in the US there is] a comparatively high level of wage dispersion but a moderate level of market income inequality. ( ... )

What Figure 1 does not reveal is that the cross-national portrait of market income inequality─and the US' comparative position in particular─shifts when we consider only those households that we expect to be most heavily reliant on market income. Those would be households whose adult members have, for the most part, not yet reached the age when they shift from their "employment years" (i.e., greater reliance on the market) to their "retirement years" (i.e., greater reliance on income transfers).

To assess this more closely, we re-ran the analysis shown in Figure 1, now including only households without persons aged 60 or over. We presents those results in Figure 2. Like Figure 1, the light and dark bars report inequality in market and disposable income, respectively, and countries are ranked by inequality in disposable income.

( ... ... ) All told, when we shift from Figure 1 to Figure 2, the story of US exceptionalism changes markedly. Among American working-age households, in cross-national terms, market income inequality is comparatively high (not moderate) and the level of redistribution is, in fact, moderate (not low).

With Figure 2 in hand, we now look back at Figure 1 and see the US “story” with fresh eyes. We are now attentive to a
crucial fact that is obscured in Figure 1: Americans, overall, shift from reliance on market income to reliance on income transfers later in life and/or less fully than do their counterparts in many other rich countries.


( ... ... )

In the end, our conclusion is that, while Figure 1 is technically accurate, Figures 1 and 2 considered together tell a more nuanced─and more complete─story about income inequality in the US in cross-national perspective, esp about the comparative strength (or weakess) of redistribution in the US through taxes and transfers.

Our key point is that, when we estimate population-wide redistribution levels (as in Figure 1), the lesser reliance on income transfers by older American households reduced overall level of redistribution in the US relative to other countries. Once older households are removed, market income inequality (for the working age population) in the US is seen to be compartively high─higher than we would conclude from Figure 1 alone.

( ... ... )

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