New article published in JEEA on income inequality and taxation in Italy

The article reconstructs novel series on income distribution in Italy combining survey data, tax data, and National Accounts both at the national and regional levels, and it analyzes the overall progressivity of the tax system.

The new Distributional National Accounts allow to correct for remarkable misreporting of capital income in surveys, to provide more accurate estimates of consumption, and to better account for the role of informal economy.

Key findings:

• The estimates show higher income concentration at the top 1% and 0.1% with respect to previous studies in order of 1.5 percentage points.
• Moreover, the share of national income of the richest top 10%, top 1%, and top 0.1% has been steadily increasing after the 2008 crisis.
• The results shed further light on the multifaceted nature of inequality in Italy: youngest individuals, women, and inhabitants of Southern regions have been increasingly exposed to growing levels of inequality.
• The Italian tax system is only slightly progressive up to the 95th percentile of the income distribution, and regressive for the top 5%.
• Moreover, it is regressive throughout the whole distribution when individuals are ranked with respect to their net wealth.

Tax rate by income percentiles, 2015

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