The Discussion Papers series presents results from ongoing research projects and other research and analysis by SSB staff, intended for international journals or books. The views and conclusions in this document are those of the author(s).
The proposed framework is applicable when historical wealth tabulations as a minimum provide information on bracket boundaries and the proportion of tax units for each of the wealth brackets.The framework has been used to produce evidence on wealth inequality in Norway from 1912 to 2019. The empirical results show that wealth inequality as measured by the Gini coefficient was very high at the beginning of the twentieth century, fell during the post-war period and has increased substantially since the 1980s. The rise in wealth inequality over the recent four decades is driven by a rise in the wealth share of the top 1 per cent, while equalization among the bottom 99 per cent accounted for 70 percent of the reduction in wealth inequality from the early 1950s to the late 1960s.