Inequality in Britain is rising fast, says a new report out today from the OECD which shows it getting worse at a quicker rate here than in any other country in the group.
The average income of the richest 10% of earners in the UK was almost twelve times that of the bottom 10% of the population by 2008, up from eight times in 1985 and above the European ratio of nine to one.
Author of the report Michael Forster says:
Income inequality has risen to a record level over the past 25 to 30 years, although it has increased in both low and high income economies alike”
The report, which examined earnings in each of the OECD’s 34 member countries and took more than two years to complie, based its measurements on the Gini coefficient, where countries are ranked between a figure of zero where everyone earns the same to 1 – where the richest person has all the income.
The key facts from the report are:
• The UK’s figure was just under 0.35 before the financial crisis, higher than the OECD average of 0.316.
• This is lower than the US, Mexico and Chile, which had the highest level of inequality in 2008 at a coefficient of almost 0.5.
• Slovenia was the most equal: with a coefficient of just over 0.2
• Top 1 percent of earners increased their share of income from 7.1% in 1970 to 14.3% in 2005. Prior to the recession, the top 0.1 percent of earners accounted for 5% of pre-tax income, while income tax for higher earners declined from 60% in the 1980s to 50%
The annual average income in the UK of the top 10% in 2008 was just under £55,000, about 12 times higher than that of the bottom 10%, who had an average income of £4,700.
In very few countries is this position improving, but many of them are countries in severe economic straits: Greece, Spain and Ireland, for instance.
Randeep Ramesh writes today that even in countries thought of as more equal, the position is worsening.
The report makes clear that even in countries viewed as “fairer” – such as Germany, Denmark and Sweden – this pay gap between rich and poor is expanding: from five to one in the 1980s to six to one today. In the rising powers of Brazil, Russia, India and China the ratio is an alarming 50 to one.
We’ve extracted some of the key data below. What can you do with it?
Data summary
Download the data
• DATA: download the full spreadsheet
More open data
Data journalism and data visualisations from the Guardian
World government data
• Search the world’s government data with our gateway
Development and aid data
• Search the world’s global development data with our gateway
Can you do something with this data?
• Flickr Please post your visualisations and mash-ups on our Flickr group
• Contact us at data@guardian.co.uk
• Get the A-Z of data
• More at the Datastore directory
• Follow us on Twitter
• Like us on Facebook
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010
