IFS Deaton Inequality Review Country Studies. The evolution of labor market and disposable income inequalities over recent decades in high-income countries has generated intense interest in academia and the wider public. UKCPR is collaborating with the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) in London, England, to examine a broad set of inequalities in a coherent framework across 17 major economies of Europe and North America and how they have changed in recent decades, including through the COVID-19 pandemic.
Led by James Ziliak at UKCPR and Richard Blundell and Jonathan Cribb at IFS, the project provides a major source of comparative international research on economic inequality with a team of over 50 scholars across all 17 countries. To date, each country has produced country-specific reports following the same template with roughly 50 figures on the same outcomes across countries. In 2024 we also published a two-issue collection of the peer-reviewed journal Fiscal Studies containing country-specific narratives on the evolution of inequality. Our final component of the project is ongoing, consisting of a systematic comparison of labor-market and income inequalities with formal tests of cross-country convergence.
The project is made possible by the funding from the Trans-Atlantic Platform (T-AP) Recovery, Renewal and Resilience in a Post-Pandemic World grant competition. This provided funding from six national funding agencies: the Social Science and Humanities Research Council (Canada); Agence Nationale de la Recherche (France); Academy of Finland (Finland); Ministry for Education and Research (Germany); the Economic and Social Research Council (UK); and the National Science Foundation (US).