ABSTRACT
Private households have firsthand experience of the welfare state through transfers, which contribute to their gross income, and through taxes, which reduce their gross income to disposable income. Households are, among other things, economic units in which household members pool incomes and cooperate on their use. A household with all its income from transfers has a different income dependency than a household with all its income from earnings. The use of tax-return data for income analysis is not without problems, in that tax-purpose concepts are not necessarily the most relevant ones for analytic purposes. The period studied has been one of increasing affluence for Norwegian households and also one during which noticeable changes have occurred in the income-generation process. The importance of wage income increases with affluence up to the ninth decile and then falls sharply so that the incidence of wage income in the very top income groups is much lower than on average for all households.
