چکیده:
This paper studies top income shares in Iran, using 26 Household Expenditure and Income Surveys conducted by the Statistical Center of Iran over the period 1985-2015. It is shown that after the imposed Iran-Iraq war, top income groups were raising their real income and income share by 2006; however, both their share and real income fell immediately after 2006 such that the numbers are now below their wartime level. It is explained that the fall is caused by the negative effects of the United Nations Security Council sanctions on the top capital income earners. The paper also measures the concentration of income by the inverted Pareto coefficient and finds that the concentration had been generally increasing by 2000; however, the upward trend reverses from 2000 onwards. Although the concentration of income and the top income groups’ share have fallen significantly in Iran in recent years, the numbers are still large, and Iran is among the most inegalitarian countries.
خلاصه ماشینی:
For example, the cost of the production might have increased because of the higher costs of import of the necessary inputs in comparison to before, or the producers might have lost their foreign costumers or cannot export their products, or they might have lost their local costumers because of the fall of the real income of the middle/poor class, or they might have stopped investing in their business due to uncertainty in economic activities, or they might have emigrated to abroad or have transferred their money to other countries, or all of these.
We only show that capital holders were affected negatively due to the sanctions, and this negative effect explains the fall of the top incomes and consequently the fall of income inequality in Iran over the recent past years.
Most of the developed countries experienced a sharp decline in top income shares during 1914-45 (Atkinson, Piketty & Saez, 2011).
To explain why top income shares (income inequality) fell in Iran after the sanctions, we follow a procedure similar to many other papers (see, for example, Piketty, 2006; Piketty, 2014; Atkinson & Piketty, 2007).
We first show that the Kuznets' hypothesis cannot explain the reduction of the income inequality (top income shares) in Iran, and then it is shown that the reduction comes from the fall of top capital incomes.
0 Top 20-10% Top 10-5% Top 5-1% Top 1% Figure 5: Share of Top Wage and Top Capital Income Earners , Different Top Income Groups , Iran 5.