Distributional National Accounts of Taiwan, 1991-2017
Pre-print, Working paper: We construct the pre-tax Distributional National Accounts (DINA) of Taiwan from 1981 to 2017 using survey data. Our DINA individual income series demonstrates a much larger inequality than previous results using tax tabulations and tax units. This difference is mainly due to a change in the unit of observation and the treatment of corporate retained earnings. We find that income inequality was stable in the 1980s and began to rise after the mid-1990s. After 2000, this trend further accelerated. We then estimate the distribution of economic growth. From 1981 to 2001, Taiwan experienced a period of rapid economic growth, with a growth rate of 7.32 percent annually and a fairly equal distribution of growth. From 2001 to 2017, the aggregate growth rate declined to 2.47 percent with a deteriorating distribution of growth. The increasing inequality in income and growth distribution is due to the combination of a worsening capital income distribution and rising retained earnings.
Author(s)
Cyrus Chu, Chien-Yu Chen, Ming-Jen Lin, Hsuan-Li Su
Date of publication
- 2022
Keywords JEL
Keywords
- Distributional national accounts
- Income inequality
- Pre-tax national income
Internal reference
- World Inequality Lab Working Papers n°2022-15
URL of the HAL notice
Version
- 1