Branko Milanovic (@BrankoMilan) a mis en exergue, par une graphe, l’un des changements majeurs depuis la fin du siècle dernier. Il s’est interrogé sur l’évolution des revenus réels (hors inflation donc) de 1988 à 2008, non pas à l’intérieur d’un pays comme cela a souvent été fait, mais à l’échelle globale. Il découpe l’ensemble de la distribution des revenus en part de 1% et regarde l’évolution des revenus par centile. Il obtient une courbe souvent qualifiée “en forme d’éléphant” (voir l’illustration en bas du post).
Ce que dit Milanovic est que pour les personnes au voisinage de la médiane (point A), principalement des chinois et des indiens, le revenu a augmenté de 80%. Sur une période aussi courte c’est phénoménal.
En revanche, le point B, qui correspond à la partie basse de la distribution des revenus dans les pays développés, traduit une nette dégradation de la situation. Y-t-il un parallèle entre la hausse du point A et la baisse de B? C’est un point que l’on ne peut pas exclure (voir les travaux de David Autor @davidautor )
Enfin le point C montre l’importance du centile le plus élevé dans la distribution récente des revenus.
The greatest reshuffle of individual incomes since the Industrial Revolution
by Branko Milanovic
The effects of trade, or more broadly of globalisation, on incomes and their distribution in the rich countries have been much studied, beginning with a number of works on wage distributions in the 1990s, to more recent papers on the effects of globalisation on the labour share (Karabarbounis and Neiman 2013, Elsby et al. 2013), wage inequality (Ebenstein et al. 2015), and routine middle class jobs (Autor and Dorn 2010).
In joint work with Christoph Lakner (Lakner and Milanovic 2015) and in a recently published book, Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization (Milanovic 2016), I take a different approach of looking at real incomes across the world population. This is made possible thanks to the data from almost 600 household surveys from approximately 120 countries in the world covering more than 90% of the world population and 95% of global GDP. Since household surveys are not available for all countries annually, the data are ‘centred’ on benchmark years, at five-year intervals, starting with 1988 and ending in 2008. I report the results for up to 2011 in Milanovic (2016), while Lakner has an unpublished update for 2013. The updates confirm, or reinforce, the key findings for 1988-2008 that I discuss here.
The advantage of a global approach resides in its comprehensiveness and the ability to observe and analyse the effects of globalisation in many parts of the world and on many parts of the global income distribution. While the true or putative effects of globalisation on working class incomes in the rich world have become the object of fierce political battles – especially in the wake of the Brexit vote and the rise of Donald Trump to political prominence in the US – the overall effects of globalisation on the rest of the world have received less attention, and when they have, were studied separately, as if independent, from the effects observed in the rich word.
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