ABSTRACT
Incomes, taxation and income transfers are themes that arouse continuous interest in the various sectors of our welfare society. The distribution of incomes and possible imbalances in this attract keen interest among politi cians active at different levels in society, among officials and also among researchers. Income differentials and changes in these in the late 1990s have also been a major topic in the mass media. Following the declining economic trends prevailing in Finland in the early 1990s, there has been even more discussion of the nation being divided into two parts (e.g., comments by the Hunger group and ...; Forma, 1999), into A-class and IBclass, or marginalized citizens (Eva, 1999), or into regions with uneven de velopment.
