| 1. |
- Bengtsson, Erik, et al.
(author)
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Capital Shares and Income Inequality: Evidence from the Long Run
- 2016
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Other publication (other academic/artistic)abstract
- This paper investigates the relationship between the capital share in national income and personal income inequality over the long run. Using a new historical cross-country database on capital shares in 19 countries and data from the World Wealth and Income Database, we find strong long-run links between the aggregate role of capital in the economy and the size distribution of income. Over time, this dependence varies; it was strong both before the Second World War and in the early interwar era, but has grown to its highest levels in the period since 1980. The correlation is particularly strong in Anglo-Saxon and Nordic countries, in the very top of the distribution and when we only consider top capital incomes. Replacing top income shares with a broader measure of inequality (Gini coefficient), the positive relationship remains but becomes somewhat weaker.
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| 2. |
- Bengtsson, Erik, et al.
(author)
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Mercantilist Inequality : Wealth and Poverty in Stockholm 1650-1750
- 2019
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Other publication (other academic/artistic)abstract
- This paper maps social structure, poverty, wealth and economic inequality in Stockholm from 1650 to 1750. We begin by establishing the social structure, using census data and other sources. To study wealth and poverty, the main sources are a sample from the wealth tax of 1715, and probate inventory samples from 1650, 1700 and 1750. These provide detailed and sometimes surprising insights into the living standards of both the poor and rich. Stockholm in this period was a starkly unequal city, with the top decile of wealth holders owning about 90 per cent of total wealth. We argue that this inequality was the result of deliberate policy – the Mercantilist conviction of “just rewards” for each and every one according to his or her standing. The case of Stockholm shows the need for the historical inequality literature to consider class and power relations to understand the determinants of inequality.
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| 3. |
- Bengtsson, Erik
(author)
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The Changing Meaning of the Wage Bargaining Round in Sweden since the 1960s: A Contextual Approach to Shifts in Industrial Relations
- 2023
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Other publication (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Sweden is renowned for its centralized wage bargaining system, which has been studied for decades from the point of view of inflation, wage differentials and unemployment. A coordinated system in place since 1997 has been compared to the centralized system of the postwar era, while other scholars have pointed to differences in how the institutions work in practice. This paper studies media coverage of wage bargaining rounds in the 1950s-1960s and in the 2000s-2010s to investigate the social understanding of what the wage bargaining institutions are supposed to do. The results indicate that the operation of the wage bargaining system in the 2000s and that in the post-war era are in fact understood very differently: while widely shared aims for wage bargaining rounds in the 1950s and 1960s were to a high degree formulated by the trade unions, trade union influence over the agenda was significantly weaker in the 2000s and 2010s, when external experts, not the least from the financial sector, were to a much higher degree used to define and formulate what good bargaining outcomes would be.
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| 4. |
- Castañeda Garza, Diego, et al.
(author)
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Income Inequality in Mexico 1895-1940: Industrialization, Revolution, Institutions
- 2020
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Other publication (other academic/artistic)abstract
- This paper, building on new archival research, presents the first comprehensive estimates of income inequality in Mexico before 1950. We use the social tables method of combining census information with group- level income data to reconstruct Mexican incomes and their distribution for four benchmark years, 1895, 1910, 1930 and 1940. The Gini coefficient for incomes is 0.48 in 1895, 0.47 in 1910, 0.41 in 1930 and 0.51 in 1940. The evidence points to inequality as a multi-faceted phenomenon. Mexican income inequality was shaped by the economic policies of the various regimes, as well as the growth possibilities of various sectors. The revolution of the 1910s entailed reforms (of the labor market and of land ownership) which equalized incomes, but when these reforms were substantially reversed, inequality rose again. The developments are in line with a new branch of the literature that recognizes the importance for inequality dynamics of land ownership. The levels of inequality in the long term display rather strong persistence, in line with institutionalist arguments.
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| 5. |
- Bengtsson, Erik, et al.
(author)
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The living standards of the labouring classes in Sweden, 1750–1900: Evidence from rural probate inventories
- 2020
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Other publication (other academic/artistic)abstract
- This paper presents new estimates of the living standards among the rural labouring classes in Sweden from 1750 to 1900. Starting with a database of more than 1,000 probate inventories of rural landless and semi-landless people from the benchmark years 1750, 1800, 1850 and 1900, we study the development for crofters in particular. We measure their assets and debts in great detail, mapping the development of material living standards over time. We show that the typically used real wage approach to living standards gives only a partial impression of the development of proletarian living standards. Above all, the decline of Swedish living standards from 1750 to 1800 is overestimated because of overreliance on grain prices for the CPI. We show the advantages of using probate inventories for studying living standards, since they give a composite estimate of households’ material conditions, no matter what combinations of wage-labour, subsistence work and by-employment are used. This has relevance not only for Sweden, but for studies of historical living standards in general.
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| 6. |
- Bengtsson, Erik
(author)
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Agrar ojämlikhet i Sverige studerad med bevillningstaxeringen som källa, 1870–1920
- 2022
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Other publication (other academic/artistic)abstract
- This Swedish-language investigation concerns the usefulness of the Swedish property tax, introduced in 1862, as a source for studying wealth inequality in the agrarian sector. A one percent sample of all taxpayers in rural areas, following the original taxation lists archived at the National Archives in Stockholm, has been made for four counties in three years: 1870, 1900, 1920. The counties are Malmöhus, a wealthy but polarized area in the south, Älvsborg, a farmer-dominated area in the west, Jönköping, a farmer-dominated area in the centre-south, and Västmanland, an industrialized area in central-northern Sweden. The data encompass 1,477 taxpayers in 1870, 2 499 taxpayers in 1900, and 3 219 taxpayers in 1920. In total, 7 195 taxpayers. The investigation shows that inequality was quite high in the agrarian sector in Sweden in this time. In 1870, the ten percent of taxpayers with the most real estate owned 82.2 percent of taxed real estate in Malmöhus, 53.2 percent in Älvsborg, and 49.7 percent in Västmanland. Inequality declined in Malmöhus and Älvsborg to 1900, when the top decile shares were 62.7 and 43.7 respectively, but rose in Västmanland. In Jönköping, where the sample is too small in 1870, the top decile share in 1900 was 44.0 percent. Inequality was relatively stable from 1900 to 1920: it grew in Älvsborg, but decreased in Västmanland, and was stable in Malmöhus and Jönköping. When all four counties are taken together, it reinforces the picture of especially high inequality in 1870: the top decile’s share measured on the level of all four counties fell from 74.4 percent in 1870 to 59-60 percent in 1900 and 1920. The Gini coefficient for rural wealth in the four counties is estimated as 81.1 in 1870, 70.7 in 1900 and 70.4 in 1920. A decomposition shows that within-county and between-county inequality are both important parts of inequality as a whole. In an appendix, six further counties are added for the year 1900, taking the sample size for this year to 8,053. The results, in terms of inequality, with ten counties are quite similar to those with four. The text discusses the source value of the tax data and how the findings should be interpreted – for example, only those who owned real estate were included, which means that those completely without real estate are not included in the present investigation.
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| 7. |
- Bengtsson, Erik, et al.
(author)
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Does Democratization Cause Redistribution? Evidence from Sweden and Brazil
- 2021
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Other publication (other academic/artistic)abstract
- This paper explores the relationship between democratization and economic redistribution using case study analysis applied to Sweden and Brazil. We find that democratization is intimately connected to redistribution through the welfare state, but as an event in itself is neither a necessary nor a sufficient cause of redistributive reforms. Democratization is not strictly necessary, because in anticipation of social unrest and social protest movements, political regimes, including undemocratic regimes, imposed welfare reforms to co-opt these movements. This can be seen for example in Sweden in the early twentieth century or in Brazil in the 1930s, 1940s and the 1970s. Democratization is also not sufficient for redistribution, since people also needed to act politically within the new democratic regimes to make use of the formal constitutional changes. The ability to act politically depends on organizational opportunities, which are facilitated when there are few barriers to influence policymaking (e.g., strikes, unionization, working class political parties, unified labour markets, reformist intellectuals and a competent and cooperative bureaucracy). The lack of these factors is enough to introduce substantial temporal lag in the adoption of reforms. More generally, given that democratization itself is a form of redistribution, the same social forces – i.e. social movements representing disenfranchised lower-income groups – commonly push for both, confounding the effect of democratization on redistribution. The historical case studies in this paper help us understand how.
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| 8. |
- Bengtsson, Erik, et al.
(author)
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Incomes and Income Inequality in Stockholm, 1870–1970: Evidence from Micro Data
- 2022
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Other publication (other academic/artistic)abstract
- This paper builds on a new dataset from the population register, comprising 38,022 randomly sampled Stockholm residents. The register was also the income tax list, with information about people’s incomes of various types, age, and household composition, in the years 1870, 1880, 1900, 1910, 1920, 1940 and 1950. We use this dataset, along with the census of 1930, which uniquely included income information, and a Statistics Sweden random sample for 1960 and 1970, to calculate the growth and distribution of incomes in Stockholm over a hundred years. The Gini coefficient between 1870 and 1920 was high for both individuals and households, around 60-70 and with no change statistically significant at the 95 percent level. After 1920 inequality fell quite steadily for every benchmark year. The top decile’s share of incomes (among households) fell from 50 percent or higher in 1870–1920 to less than 40 percent in 1930 and around 30 percent in 1950. The equalization was driven not only by gains for middle income groups, but also by gains for the bottom half of the distribution. Women constituted the larger share of the bottom half of income earners. Domestic servants, the single largest group in the city, earned very little but reduced their share of working-class jobs from 45 percent in 1870 to 10 percent in 1950. Generally, upgrading jobs was an important way of reducing income inequality. Decomposing the inequality decline from 1920 to 1950 between age, gender, class and sector of occupation shows that class was by far the largest determinant of inequality and of its decline.
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| 9. |
- Bengtsson, Erik
(author)
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Inequality and the working class in Scandinavia 1800 to 1910. Workers’ share of growing income
- 2016
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Other publication (other academic/artistic)abstract
- One of the major ways in which economic inequality can increase is when the development of wages of ordinary workers trail productivity and GDP growth, meaning that the increasing riches fall in the hand of other social groups (top employees, owners of land and capital). This paper investigates the relationship between wages and GDP in Denmark, Norway and Sweden from 1800 to 1910, using wage series for workers in agriculture as well as crafts and industry. It shows wages trailing especially in Norway from 1840 to the mid- 1870s but also in Denmark in the 1850s and 1860s. On the other hand, wages generally increase faster than GDP in the 1880s and 1890s. These developments are explained with labour supply (population growth, migration) as well as class conflict and social policy.
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| 10. |
- Bengtsson, Erik, et al.
(author)
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Peasant Aristocrats? Wealth and Social Status of Swedish Farmer Parliamentarians 1769–1895
- 2018
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Other publication (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Sweden was unique in early modern Europe, in that its parliament included a peasant farmer estate. It is commonplace in Swedish and international research to consider the peasant farmer politicians as the guarantee of a liberal and egalitarian path of development. On the other hand, in the Swedish-language political history literature, the peasant politicians are often seen as rather narrow-minded, their common political program limited to the issue of keeping (their own) taxes as low as possible, and opposed to any expansion of social policy and citizenship rights. To address the role of peasant farmer politicians, this paper presents a novel dataset of the social and economic status of the peasant MPs, with benchmarks for the 1769, 1809, 1840, 1865 and 1895 parliaments. We show that the politicians were three to four times wealthier than their voters, and in the 1895 parliament even 7.8 times wealthier. They were more likely to take bourgeois surnames and their children were likely to make a transition away from the peasant class and into the middle class. The exclusiveness of the peasant politicians, which increased over the nineteenth century, has implications for their policies, and helps explain the increasing conservatism and right-ward drift of Swedish farmer politics over the century.
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