Reply #27: Income inequality in both Japan & Germany has been growing since the [View All]

90's, & both Germany & Japan have education systems which are significantly segregated by class.

The authors of Policy Insight No. 4 shows that although income inequality in Germany is a long way from reaching US proportions, the trend is in that direction. Germany rich are getting richer, and its super-rich are getting super-richer.

Inequality of market incomes in Germany, as measured by standard summary indicators such as the Gini coefficient, moderately increased in the period from 1992 to 2001. This finding is consistent with those reported in previous studies that failed to incorporate both tails of the income distribution.

However, we have found that standard summary measures of inequality disguise important changes in the distribution of market incomes.

On the one hand, a third of the German population receives almost no market income, and the share of market income going to the middle deciles sharply declined since the early 1990s. Consequently, median market income declined substantially, both in absolute terms and relative to mean income.

http://www.voxeu.org/index.php?q=node/247