پراکندگی منطقه ای نابرابری درآمد در نروژ – قرن نوزدهم The regional dispersion of income inequality in nineteenth-century Norway

1. Introduction Most theories of modern growth have implications for the change of income inequality across stages of development. In the canonical “simple model” by Kuznets (1955), income inequality increases with early modernization, as the population gradually shifts from low-income agriculture to the higher-income (and relatively higher-inequality) non-agricultural economy. However, there is still little evidence of how and to what extent this process actually operated during the period of industrialization of Europe in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. In most cases, this is due to limited data availability. Nationally harmonized income taxation was rare until the turn of the twentieth century, and while there was increasing concern about the conditions of the very poor, few countries kept any records of the overall distribution of income. Where such information does exist, it is typically tabulated for countries as a whole and does not allow for a decomposition across geographic regions or occupations. Better data on regional development in nineteenth-century Western Europe dramatically increases the number of observations useful for evaluating typical theories of income inequality and growth. Follow-up studies of the Kuznets curve, originally proposed based on only five data points from 1850 onward, have mainly examined the relationship between inequality and growth directly (see for example Van Zanden, 1995); the proposed cross-section characteristics remain underexplored. For any given country, there are events separate from secular economic development (such as wars) that have major influences on inequality trajectories. For this reason, it is of interest to see how the classical theories of economic structure and income inequality are reflected in the cross-section within a country, in this way holding the institutional setting and technological environment constant. The study of such a crosssection of inequality and economic development is one aim of this paper, which calculates complete income distributions for 491 municipalities and 19 occupation groups in Norway in 1868.