ABSTRACT
This chapter presents in comparable form a considerable number of figures collected by other authors and by institutions on income distribution in Western countries. Most critics of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century Western societies have selected income distribution as one of their main targets. The differences in trends with Western countries are striking and reflect the dramatic problems of developing countries in social matters. The chapter focuses on three income concepts only: primary income, that is, income before taxes; income after tax; and income after complete redistribution by public finance. The difference between households and income recipients on the one hand and persons consuming on the other hand is much larger than the difference between the number of households and of income recipients. Income distribution is treated only as the frequency distribution over households or persons and not as the distribution over factors of production.
